[OS X TeX] Word to LaTeX

[Bob Kerstetter]

On Dec 5, 2005, at 10:51 AM, Alain Schremmer wrote:

> Friedrich Vosberg wrote:
>
>> I think, the problem is _not_ Word. The problem are the Word _users_.
>
> I have a 600 page book written in Word < X, from the outliner on  
> down, master file, style sheets, etc, etc
>
> Word X can't even display it properly.
>
> So, I wasn't too surprised when nothing I tried, and I tried three  
> or four things, really worked. As I recall, the closest I came to  
> something usable was either Abiword or NeoOffice, which can save in  
> LaTeX, but neither was worth the time and effort. So, I gave up and  
> went on to other things.
>
> The one thing I didn't try was to buy me a wintel box to run  
> Chikrii's $100 Word2Tex. But they claim wonders so if one already  
> has a wintel box, it may be worth checking it.
>
> Not to say one shouldn't try but I think that it would depend on  
> the particular file. For instance, rtf2tex, I think it was, turned  
> very short tables into long tables so, perhaps, if one has no table …

I don't have the macros anymore because all of my Word docs are  
converted--- :) ---But I converted Word to LaTeX by writing VBA  
macros to find and replace things. For example I prepended \section  
to all Heading 1's,  \subsection to Heading 2's, \item to the items  
in bullet lists and number lists, and on and on. Then I wrapped  
\textbf{} around bold, \textsl{} around italic and so on. You can run  
into problems with the bold and italic conversion if your headings  
use bold and italic, but you can work around this by removing the  
formatting for headings before converting the bold and italic. These  
macros are mostly find and replace functions and can be recorded  
while you do the first file by hand.  If you think about it, you can  
even convert tables (convert table to tab delimited text, then change  
tabs to whatever you need to mark columns) and partially convert  
placeholders for graphics (find graphics and replace with  
\includegraphic[]{}. After the conversion is done, the macros saves  
each doc as text, which can be opened with TeXShop. The files needed  
some manual clean up, such as entering itemize environments, but not  
much. Obviously I was working with structured Word docs.------------------------- Info --------------------------
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