[OS X TeX] latex2rtf: A developer's perspective

[Scott Prahl]

>> Thomas wrote
>> Line 29 is where the third \begin{equation} command starts.
>>
>> When I open test.rtf in Word I get "Fehler!" twice (German for
>> "Error!") instead of the two lower equations. But the rest is looking
>> fine.
>
> Adam reponded:
> I see the same warnings, but not the Error! messages in Word.  Please
> send me your TeX file and converted rtf file off-list, so I can see
> what I get.  That should tell us if it is a latex2rtf or Word problem
> on your side.

I think I know why it works for Adam and not for Thomas.  This is
a feature of Word.  When fields are used in an RTF document their
arguments are separated by commas.  However, the designers of Word
decided that in countries that use a comma as a decimal point, that
commas should not be used to separate entries.  Consequently, field
arguments must be separated by semi-colons instead in these countries.

Yes, this is insane.

Now we could have created two versions of latex2rtf to handle this
situation: one for the US and one for Germany.  I thought that this
was excessive and instead added a command line switch.  So in countries
that use a comma as a decimal point, one should invoke latex2rtf as

latex2rtf -S test.tex

Hope this helps,
Scott

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