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Converters from LaTeX to PC Textprocessors - Overview

Switch conversion direction: From PC to LaTeX

Author: Wilfried Hennings, Forschungszentrum (Research Center) Jülich GmbH
last update: July 24, 2001
The url of this page is http://tug.org/utilities/texconv/textopc.html

I maintain these pages because I need converters between LaTeX and PC Textprocessors for my work and I want to share the information with others who need it. Because I maintain them in my spare time (uh, what is spare time?), I can not answer individual questions.

This list is as good or as bad as its support, and I need YOUR support to update and supplement this list. Please supplement if you know more and/or better ones. There are some more converters on the CTAN sites, but the following seem to be most promising for conversion to and from the current versions of wordprocessors.

Neither correctness nor completeness is guaranteed.
All opinions mentioned (if any) are my own, not my employer's. Please send corrections, enhancements and supplements to the following address:
W.Hennings@fz-juelich.de

Note that this FAQ list contains information about converters ONLY between LaTeX and PC word processors. Converters to and from other formats may have own FAQ lists - e.g. see the link for converters to and from HTML.


For the impatient, here is a table with overview of features of the most recent converters.


General Remarks

Before looking for a converter, stop and think about a principal question:

What do you want to be converted in which way?

Do you want to convert the document structure, i.e. a heading should remain a heading, a list should remain a list etc., no matter how it will look like in the target format?
Or do you want to convert the appearance, i.e. how it looks like, no matter how it is represented in the target format?
Or do you want a mixture of both?
For using SGML as an intermediate format, you would have to specify the translation rules yourself (as far as I understood). This makes sense, and explains why different people have very different opinions about which converter best fits their needs: They simply have different demands and expectations on what should be converted and how.
So, not only practically there is no converter which is good for everyone and every purpose, but this is even principally impossible because there are no well-defined requirements which a converter should meet.

An additional problem is that TeX/LaTeX can be extended by an unlimited number of macros. Unless the converter contains a full-scale TeX system, it can at best support the publicly available macro commands, not the ones privately written by individual users. There has not yet been an attempt to use TeX itself for producing a textprocessor compatible output, and I don't know whether this would be even principally possible.

So the best you can expect is that a converter supports the standard LaTeX commands and perhaps a few more widely used packages.

So keep this in mind when looking through the following list of converters, try yourself and decide what you need.

There are several ways to convert.

To illustrate these, let me restrict it to the Microsoft Word case:

  1. LaTeX -> RTF (Word ASCII format, use Word's own RTF import)
  2. LaTeX -> HTML (use Word's internet assistant or built-in html converter)
  3. maybe other external format(s)

The converters being most complete and currently maintained / supported are:

ltx2rtf - a free converter for PC and Unix which partly relies on other software (e.g. a full TeX system)

latex2rtf - a free standalone converter for PC and Unix

TexPort - a commercial TeX/LaTeX to WordPerfect and Microsoft Word converter


Using a Word macro

Free:

tex2doc, by Thomas Link: LaTeX to WinWord 6 and WinWord 7(95) converter, written as Word macros. Also attempts to convert tables!

ltx2word, by myself: LaTeX to WinWord 6, WinWord 7(95) and WinWord 97 converter, written as Word macros. No tables yet.


Use a Word import filter

Yet no such solution available, but Chikrii Softlab http://www.word2tex.com/ is working on it. Will probably be Shareware.

Use a Powerpoint add-in

TexPoint enables the easy use of Latex symbols and formulas in Powerpoint presentations. See homepage.


Converting to RTF

Free:

The following two converters are based on the latex2rtf converter which was originally developed by a group of students supervised by Ralf Schlatterbeck at TU Wien (Vienna). Unfortunately, two different teams have been implementing further developments, not knowing of each other.

ltx2rtf: LaTeX-to-RTF-converter. Most complete, but requires some additional software packages. (Currently maintained by Daniel Taupin.)

latex2rtf: LaTeX-to-RTF-converter. Only rudimentary conversion of equations yet. (Currently maintained by Georg Lehner, but he has not much time. Anyone interested in taking over the maintenance?)

LEQ: LaTeX-to-Word converter. Requires Python (free) and MS Word. Translates TeX equations to Word's formula fields first. If double-clicked in Word, a formula field will be converted to an equation editor object, but I have some bad experiences with this conversion from LEQ homepage

The following is not intended as an all-purpose converter but to produce printed manuals as well as online help from a single LaTeX source (with a limited subset of LaTeX commands).

TeX2RTF: LaTeX-to-RTF converter. TeX2RTF homepage (UK site)


Converting to WordPerfect format

Commercial:

TexPort converts your TeX and LaTeX files to WordPerfect or Microsoft Word documents. KTALK's home page (USA)


HTML as intermediate format

LaTeX to HTML

Because HTML is a structured format, the conversion between HTML and LaTeX is rather straightforward. However there remain the limitations of HTML compared to LaTeX, i.e. there are many elements in LaTeX which can not (yet?) be represented in HTML. Converters from LaTeX to HTML are:

latex2html (UK site): LaTeX-to-HTML converter which converts LaTeX formulae into eps or gif graphics.
latex2html sources (US site)

tth (US site): LaTeX-to-HTML converter which translates LaTeX into HTML3.2 markup. Formulae are also translated into standard html markup. A version which translates maths to MML is in the testing phase.

ltoh (US site): LaTeX-to-HTML converter which is highly customizable, i.e. you can define how the LaTeX macros which are used in your document are to be translated.

HEVEA (FR site): LaTeX-to-HTML converter which translates LaTeX into HTML4.0 markup. Formulae are also translated into standard html markup (not yet using MML).

TeX4ht is a highly configurable TeX-based authoring system for hypertext. It comes with a built-in default setting for plain TeX and LaTeX. With some tweaking, it also allows converting to XML.

Hyperlatex allows the use of a subset of LaTeX to produce documents in HTML .

Some converters are available from CTAN ("Comprehensive TeX Archive Network"), e.g. in .../support/latex2html.
(The ... stands for a host specific base directory, which often is either "/pub/tex" or "/tex-archive")

Also see www.w3.org for a list of converters between LaTeX and HTML .

HTML to Wordprocessor

There are free HTML converters for Word 6 and 7 (95) for Windows available from Microsoft:
Download... IA for Word 6 / IA for Word 7 / IA for Word for Mac
Word 8 (97) contains an html converter by default (but its installation may have to be explicitly chosen during the Word 97 setup in user-defined mode). So does Word 9 (2000).

WordPerfect 7 and up have an integrated InternetPublisher.
For WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows, the InternetPublisher is available separately:
Download... InternetPublisher for WPWin 6.1

Also see www.w3.org for a list of converters between HTML and word processors.


Other intermediate formats

There are ways to use SGML as intermediate format, and others have used it successfully. Having had a quick look at it, I found it rather complicated, especially it seems that you have to define the translation rules yourself. So I did not put more effort in trying to use it. If anyone can give a ready-to-use cookbook solution, I will include it here.

An upcoming format is XML, a subset of which can be exported and imported by Microsoft Office 2000, and the browser programmers are working on implementing XML. It actually is an instance of SGML. As it is more powerful than HTML, conversion from LaTeX to XML would lose much less information than conversion from LaTeX to HTML. There are good chances that it could be used as a general exchange format in the future, but I don't know of a LaTeX->XML converter yet.


Converting to FrameMaker

la2mml: converts LaTeX to FrameMaker format. homepage

FrameMaker Utilities (UK site): Contains converters for both directions (LaTeX <-> FrameMaker) as well as templates which make conversion from Framemaker to LaTeX more easy


This HTML page is part of the texcnv site.
Copyright © 1998, 1999, 2000, 2001 Wilfried Hennings
You may copy and redistribute it under the following conditions:

Please also note the disclaimer.