Other conversions to and from (La)TeX
- troff Tr2latex
, assists in the translation of a
''troff'' document into LaTeX 2.09 format. It recognises most ''-ms'' and ''-man'' macros, plus most ''eqn'' and some ''tbl'' preprocessor commands. Anything fancier needs to be done by hand. Two style files are provided. There is also a man page (which converts very well to LaTeX...). ''Tr2latex'' is an enhanced version of the earlier ''troff-to-latex'' (which is no longer available).
- WordPerfect wp2latex
is actively maintained, and is
available either for MS-DOS or for Unix systems.
- RTF Rtf2tex
, by Robert Lupton, is for
converting Microsoft's Rich Text Format to TeX. There is also a converter to LaTeX by Erwin Wechtl, called ''rtf2latex''. The latest converter, by Ujwal Sathyam and Scott Prahl, is ''rtf2latex2e'' which seems rather good, though development of it seems to have stalled.
Translation //to// RTF may be done (for a somewhat constrained set of LaTeX documents) by TeX2RTF, which can produce ordinary RTF, Windows Help RTF (as well as HTML, [[FAQ-LaTeX2HTML|conversion to HTML]]). TeX2RTF is supported on various Unix platforms and under Windows 3.1
- Microsoft Word A rudimentary (free) program for converting
MS-Word to LaTeX is ''wd2latex'', which runs on MS-DOS; it probably processes the output of an archaic version of MS-Word (the program itself was archived in 1991).
For conversion in the other direction, the current preferred free-software method is a two-stage process:
- Convert LaTeX to
OpenOffice
format, using the
tex4ht
command oolatex
;
- open the result in
OpenOffice
and “save as” a
MS-Word document.
(Note that ''OpenOffice'' itself is //not// on CTAN; see <http://www.openoffice.org/>, though most ''linux'' systems offer it as a ready-to-install bundle.)
''tex4ht'' can also generate OpenOffice ODT format, which may be used as an intermediate to producing Word format files.
''Word2TeX'' and ''TeX2Word'' are shareware translators from [[https://www.chikrii.com/|Chikrii Softlab]]; positive users' reports have been noted (but not recently).
If cost is a constraint, the best bet is probably to use an intermediate format such as RTF or HTML. ''Word'' outputs and reads both, so in principle this route may be useful.
You can also use PDF as an intermediate format: Acrobat Reader for Windows (version 5.0 and later) will output rather feeble RTF that ''Word'' can read.
- Excel Excel2Latex
converts an Excel
file
into a LaTeX ''tabular'' environment; it comes as a ''xls'' file which defines some ''Excel'' macros to produce output in a new format.
- runoff Peter Vanroose's rnototex
conversion program is written in VMS Pascal. The sources are distributed with a VAX executable.
- refer/tib There are a few programs for converting bibliographic
data between BibTeX and ''refer''/''tib'' formats. The collection includes a shell script converter from BibTeX to ''refer'' format as well. The collection is not maintained.
- PC-Writepcwritex.arc
is a
print driver for PC-Write that "prints" a PC-Write V2.71 document to a TeX-compatible disk file. It was written by Peter Flynn at University College, Cork, Republic of Ireland.
Wilfried Hennings' FAQ, which deals specifically with conversions between TeX-based formats and word processor formats, offers much detail as well as tables that allow quick comparison of features.
A group at Ohio State University (USA) is working on
a common document format based on SGML, with the ambition that any
format could be
translated to or from this one. FrameMaker
provides
“import filters” to aid translation from alien formats
(presumably including TeX) to FrameMaker
s own.