[OS X TeX] Word to LaTeX

[Simon Spiegel]

Hi everybody,

in a thread on the Ars MacAchaia the question was raised whether how  
you could use Word and LaTeX together, so that you would create your  
documents in Word and then finally create a nice output for print in  
LaTeX. After a bit of digging, I found wordml2latex <http:// 
www.ctan.org/tex-archive/help/Catalogue/entries/wordml2latex.html>  
which does exactly this: It's a xsl stylesheet for converting Word  
documents into LaTeX. Unfortunately, it depends on WordML, an XML  
format introduced in Word03 (not to be confused with XML format  
announced for Office12) which is *not* supported in Word04 for Mac.

After digging a bit more, I found out that OSX10.4 comes with a shell  
app called textutil which converts between several formats, among  
them .doc and WordML! Now, in theory, we have all we need for a  
decent Word->LaTeX wordflow. Unfortunately, this doesn't seem to work  
properly. I tried with an extremely simple Word document, but the  
result wasn't usable. I don't know where the problem is, whether it  
is textutil or wordml2latex but the translation doesn't work properly.

I would be very glad if someone more knowledgable looked into this,  
if we make this thing work, it could be huge. I'm thinking of an  
"import from Word" function in TeXShop!

cheers

simon


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