[OS X TeX] how to convert .doc to .TEX?

[Bob Kerstetter]

On Jan 17, 2005, at 2:32 PM, Luc Feitknecht wrote:

> Hi there,
>
> I have some MSWord documents which I would like to use from now on in 
> LaTeX. Has anyone made good experience with that RTF2Latex converter 
> dropled which seemed to work fine in MacOS 9 (classic)? Or is there 
> any more recent tool helping me not having to re-enter these 
> documennts for Latex?
> Regards
>
> Luc
>

I format all Word docs with styles. When converting to LaTeX, I search 
for a style, such as Heading 1, and replace it with \section{^&}, for 
example. For Bullet Lists and Number Lists the replacement is \item ^&. 
For bold text the replacement is \textbf{^&}. The ^& is the found text 
in Word X. I also convert smart quotes to `` and '' and apostrophes to 
'. There are probably some other things I am forgetting.

The final find and replace looks for paragraph marks followed by 
closing curly brackets, ^p}, and replaces them with curly brackets 
followed by paragraph marks, }^p. This puts the }'s on the correct 
lines for sections, subsections, etc. You have to do this because Word 
formats the paragraph marks {CR's) at the end of paragraphs. The means 
the }s get put on the next line when doing the find and replace. The 
before and after is like this:

\section{text
}

\section{text}

When someone sends a Word doc manually formatted, I convert by 
searching for text attributes and replacing with LaTeX control 
sequences. For example, I might convert Helvetica 18 Bold Italic  text 
to \section{^&}.

If you do Word to LaTeX a lot, and are more or less consistent in Word 
document formatting, you can put the Word find-replace commands into a 
Word VBA macro.

When all conversions are done, I save as plain text, open in TeXShop, 
convert all \r's to \n's then clean up any junk.

It's a not a perfect conversion, but good enough for most conversions.


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