[OS X TeX] LaTeX -> Word?

[Thomas Schröder]

Hi everybody,

In the last few days I've been doing some experiments on the conversion 
from LaTeX to Word with a little help from tex4ht but not much success.

Basic conversion with

htlatex test

gives me the file test.html which looks kind of OK in web browsers and 
can be imported into Word, but all the formulas are turned into low-res 
gifs which look of course not that great and can't be edited inside 
Word. Also, included EPS pictures are turned into not that great 
looking low-res gifs.

More sophisticated conversion with

mzlatex test

gives me the file test.xml which looks much better in web browsers 
especially in Mozilla which supports the math in the formulas. 
Unfortunately this can't be imported into Word and once again the 
included EPS pictures are turned into low-res gifs.

The most sophisticated conversion with

oolatex test

gives me the file test.sxw which apparently can be opened in 
OpenOffice.org to be exported to Word. Unfortunately, OOo completely 
leaves out the included pictures, and instead of math formulas I get 
invisible but clickable objects that do nothing. I thought the 
conversion through OOo was supposed to be great, easy and painless, so 
I'm probably missing something here.

I had to install the mzlatex and oolatex scripts from the original 
tex4ht distribution from

http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~gurari/TeX4ht/mn.html

as they don't come with Gerben's distribution, so I thought maybe 
there's something wrong here or maybe with one of the Mac versions of 
tex4ht, OOo or Word, so I went to the trouble of installing MikTeX, 
tex4ht and OOo on one of the NT stations at work. And trouble it was, 
or, rather painful, especially installing tex4ht, so let me take this 
opportunity to just quickly express my sincerest thanks to Gerben for 
giving us this great TeX distribution on the Mac!

In the end the whole thing was rather pointless, though because on 
Windows I get pretty much the same lame results :-(

So, the big question is: how do I do it? Has somebody out there 
successfully converted his LaTeX files into Word files i.e. with nice, 
editable formulas? I think I could live with replacing the pictures by 
hand, they are mainly Excel diagramms anyway. But having to replace all 
the math and formulas by hand rather spoils the effect.

Thanks for any help!

	Bye, Thomas

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