[OS X TeX] latex2rtf: A developer's perspective

[Thomas Schröder]

Actually, I wanted to send this to the list, but sent it to Scott 
directly. Oh well....

Anfang der weitergeleiteten E-Mail:

> Von: Thomas Schröder <hydrochlorix at gmx.net>
> Datum: 24. April 2004 13:50:33 MESZ
> An: Scott Prahl <prahl at bme.ogi.edu>
> Betreff: Re: [OS X TeX] latex2rtf: A developer's perspective
>
>
> Am 24.04.2004 um 06:02 schrieb Scott Prahl:
>
> Hi Scott,
>
>> I think I know why it works for Adam and not for Thomas.  This is
>> a feature of Word.  When fields are used in an RTF document their
>> arguments are separated by commas.  However, the designers of Word
>> decided that in countries that use a comma as a decimal point, that
>> commas should not be used to separate entries.  Consequently, field
>> arguments must be separated by semi-colons instead in these countries.
>
> Word never ceases to amaze me. In a bad way.
>
>> Yes, this is insane.
>
> My head has just stopped hurting from my banging it on the table :-)
>
>> Now we could have created two versions of latex2rtf to handle this
>> situation: one for the US and one for Germany.  I thought that this
>> was excessive and instead added a command line switch.
>
> How very reasonable :-)
>
>> So in countries that use a comma as a decimal point, one should 
>> invoke latex2rtf as
>>
>> latex2rtf -S test.tex
>
> I tried this, it works, I'm once again amazed! This time in a good way 
> :-)
> Thank you so much, you're my hero of the week!
> BTW, now that I know the trick I revisited the manpage and it seems to 
> me that this was to some degree a classic RTFM :-)
>
>> Hope this helps,
>
> Very much so! I think now I have something with which I can work. This 
> is certainly much faster and much less painful than having do 
> everything by hand in Word. And having to adjust a few things like 
> centering images, or cleaning up eqations from messed up operators 
> (\cdot) or some other signs (\longrightarrow) is absolutely OK. I 
> didn't really expect a one-click solution but rather more something 
> like this. With this I can continue using LaTeX for all of my work and 
> next time I need to exchange stuff latex2rtf will help me to do the 
> dirty work. Maybe latex2rtf won't be able to do it all especially when 
> it comes to my own macros, but I guess if I use both tex4ht and 
> latex2rtf  I'll be able to piece together a good-enough Word document 
> with the best of both worlds.
>
> So, thanks again Scott, Adam and all the others who participated in 
> this puzzle :-)
>
> 	Bye, Thomas
>
>


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