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Author: Wilfried Hennings (texconvfaq "at" gmx.de), this page
last updated on April 24, 2021
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 it needs 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. Please
send corrections, enhancements and supplements (auch in deutscher
Sprache) to the following address:
texconvfaq "at" gmx.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.
Before looking for a converter, stop and think about a principal question:
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?
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. Practically you can expect that it supports the standard LaTeX commands and perhaps a few more widely used packages. The only converter which uses a full-scale TeX system is TeX4ht.
So keep this in mind when looking through the following list of converters, try yourself and decide what you need.
To illustrate these, let me restrict it to the Microsoft Word case:
The converters being most complete and currently maintained / supported are:
TeX2Word - a shareware LaTeX import filter for MS Word
GrindEQ - a commercial LaTeX import filter for MS Word
latex2rtf - a free standalone LaTeX -> RTF converter for PC, Macintosh and Unix,
TeX4ht - a free LaTeX to html or XML converter for PC and Unix produces html which is good for loading into Word. TeX4ht relies on other software, it needs at least a full TeX system.
There are also converters to Powerpoint and to FrameMaker (see further below).
"LaTeX in Word":
See homepage
(external link)
(Freeware, GPL).
It allows to enter LaTeX equations in word
processors such as MS Word in LaTeX markup, and the
formatted equation is inserted in the Wordprocessor as a png
bitmap. It needs a server which performs the conversion. Server
installation files are available from the download
page (external link).
MathType (external link) allows typing and pasting equations in LaTeX markup and also direct conversion of an equation in LaTeX markup which is part of the Word document text.
OpenOffice (or LibreOfiice) allows typing equations in LaTeX-like markup.
TeX2Word:
Shareware, 99$ (45$ academic).
Current version: 3.0, Feb 2011.
Support for more document styles and packages will be available with
future versions. You can also supply support for document styles,
packages and user defined macros by yourself (needs TeX programming
knowledge).
Needs:
Word >97, also MathType
(external
link)
4
or later is needed (full version of the Equation Editor which comes
with MS Word). Note that without registration and payment it will
revert to the free version which is sufficient for this purpose.
GrindEQ
LaTeX-to-Word: Shareware, 99EUR (49EUR academic).
converts LaTeX, AMS-LaTeX, Plain TeX, or AMS-TeX documents to Microsoft
Word format.
You can choose the following formats for TeX/LaTeX equations: Microsoft
Equation 2007, Microsoft Equation 3.x, or MathType.
Works with Microsoft Word 2003 and up and Microsoft Windows Vista and up.
Evaluation version is restricted to 10 launches.
See homepage
(external link)
latex2rtf: LaTeX-to-RTF-converter. See the more detailed page.
ltx2word,
by myself: LaTeX to WinWord 6, WinWord 7(95) and WinWord 97 converter,
written as Word macros. No tables. Not compatible with Word 2000 and
up, no further development.
See more detailed page.
The following are no full converters but only allow typing or pasting LaTeX code into Word:
"LaTeX in Word": It allows to enter
equations in word processors such as MS Word in LaTeX markup, and the
formatted equation is inserted in the Wordprocessor as a png
bitmap. It needs a server which performs the conversion.
See homepage
(external link) (Freeware, GPL)
Server installation files are available from the download
page (external link).
cost free unless otherwise stated
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:
Recommended
if you have TeX installed or don't mind to install it:
TeX4ht (external link)
is a highly configurable TeX-based converter to hypertext. It comes
with a built-in default setting for plain TeX, LaTeX and TeXinfo, and
it generates html with accompanying css stylesheet, xhtml, or xml. The
converter needs a full TeX installation, but this gives the advantage
that TeX's full support for macros and styles is available (with only
few exceptions).
Equations are converted to either bitmaps or MathML. There are some
different MathML flavors around which can be chosen by an option.
(Following description is partially copied from the TeX4ht web site.)
The special command
oolatex
is available for producing xml compatible with OpenOffice and LibreOffice. The output of the command oolatex
<filename> is a zipped file with same name and
a ".odt" extension (containing the document in xml format which does
not suffer the limitations of html).
The resulting .odt file can directly be opened in OpenOffice or
LibreOffice, converted equations are editable in OpenOffice's or
LibreOffice's own equation editor. OpenOffice and LibreOffice
can save the document in MS Word 97/2000/XP (.doc) and Word 2003-2010 (.docx) format, but
some equations may not be converted correctly to Word.
A command of the form
htlatex filename "html,word" "symbol/!"
asks for HTML output tuned toward Microsoft Word. Such a format,
however, relies on bitmaps for mathematical formulas.
Conversion to bitmaps additionally needs Ghostscript and ImageMagic or
netpbm.
For more information see
http://tug.org/applications/tex4ht/mn.html
(external link).
TTH
(external link):
LaTeX-to-HTML converter which translates LaTeX into HTML 4.0 markup.
Formulae are also translated into standard html markup. (Free for
non-commercial applications.)
A sister of tth, TtM
(external link),
converts formulae to MathML (Linux version for free, Windows version
must be paid).
ltoh (external link): 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. Requires that the input file conforms to LaTeX2e (see documentation). It was last updated 1997, and it seems that the homepage is no longer available, so look on CTAN in .../support/ltoh/ .
HEVEA (external link): LaTeX-to-HTML converter which translates LaTeX into HTML5 markup. Formulae are also translated into standard html markup (not yet using MathML).
Hyperlatex (external link) allows the use of a subset of LaTeX to produce documents in HTML .
Word 8 (97) and up contain the html converter by default (but
its installation may have to be explicitly chosen during the Word setup
in user-defined mode).
OpenOffice and LibreOffice can also import html, but much better is using tex4ht for lossless conversion to native OO format.
An upcoming format is XML, a subset of
which can be exported and imported by Microsoft Office 2000 and up,
OpenOffice uses it as its native format, 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. TeX4ht
already has scripts for converting to XML (TEI or DOCBOOK). MS Word
2000 and earlier can not import XML, for these target systems convert
to html+css using the xwtex and xwlatex scripts. MS Word 2003 can
export and import XML, but I haven't yet tested whether it can import
the TEI or DOCBOOK files produced by TeX4ht.
The most successful path is using TeX4ht
to convert to the OpenOffice format (.sxw, which actually is a zip
compressed archive containing the document and vector graphics as XML
and the bitmap graphics as bitmap files) and open this in OpenOffice.
One could stop there, as OpenOffice is publicly available, or go on and
save from OpenOffice as a "MS Word 97/2000/XP"
file.
Most astonishing, one could also use PDF as intermediate format. Generating PDF from LaTeX is straightforward if you have a full TeX implementation installed. If you have the full commercial version of Adobe Acrobat or pdf exchange editor, you can open the pdf and "save as" e.g. Word doc, or plain text. Or you can use other commercial software to convert PDF to Word, just do a www search for "pdf to word" to get several hits. In this path of conversion however the document strucure and probably some formatting will be lost.
Finally, you can use OCR software to convert any printed document to word or plain text. To avoid the inaccuracy introduced by printing to paper and scanning, you can convert the TeX output to ps or pdf, convert this to a bitmap (using ghostscript), and feed this bitmap into the ocr software.
This HTML page is part of the texconv pages.
Copyright © 1998 … 2021 Wilfried Hennings
You may copy and redistribute it under the following conditions:
Please also note the disclaimer.