[pdftex] Conversions, WAS MS Word hell, TeX heaven?

[John Culleton]

On Thursday 13 March 2003 11:24 am, James Haefner wrote:
> ripley at stats.ox.ac.uk wrote:
>
> For those that want or have to operate in both worlds, there are new
> versions of the promising MS applications to inter-convert:  Word2Tex and
> Tex2Word at:
>
> http://www.word2tex.com
>

Interesting. One of the major problems with converting Word documents to plain 
text is the use of special characters even for ordinary things like the 
apsotrophe. However Abiword (free word processor) will export Word documents 
as LaTeX. It is pretty ugly LaTeX however because the conversion routine has 
no sense of overall style. And of course I don't use LaTeX unless required by 
a customer. So I then go in with vim to delete all the LaTeX tags, or 
substitute something more sensible. For example the \ldots macro is a poor 
thing. I substitute calls to \threedots or \fourdots which merely print 
periods separated and enclosed by \thinspace items. Obviously Knuth never 
typeset novels :-)

I never convert back to MSWord DOC. RTF is as close as I will come. 

John Culleton