[OS X TeX] Translating LaTeX to Quark or InDesign

[Alan Litchfield]

Hmm. Not such a big deal really.

On 30/06/2007, at 10:31 AM, David R. Derbes wrote:

> It's a long story but I have retyped an old book (with quite a lot of
> math in it) so that a friend may republish it. As it happens, the
> friend's typesetter uses mostly Quard Xpress, but is willing to
> consider InDesign. Another possibility is (ugh) to convert to Word.

Probably part of your problem here is "this is the way we do things"  
and the mere thought of anything outside that is scary.

>
> There seems to be some software that converts LaTeX to Word and
> equations to MathType. I am willing to buy this software and do the
> conversion, if it will succeed.

You could also look at converting the pdf into various formats, which  
may be cheaper for you. For example rtf is a good option. The likely  
problems will be use of math converted into images. You obviously  
would not want them converted into jpg, which is what most conversion  
programs will do. The other thing is the likely conversion of fonts  
to some other format, eh George.

>
> Does anyone have any experience in this sort of thing? What if I
> produce a PostScript version of the book; if that is loaded into
> InDesign, does it become editable?

You can import ps and pdf into InDesign without any issues but they  
will not be editable. As mentioned you can also convert from pdf to  
other formats, say Word which can be easily imported into either QXP  
or ID. The problem is the typical conversion in most translators of  
images to jpg. In that case the typesetter may need to replace those  
with cropped sections from the original pdf, which is easily done in  
either QXP or ID.

>
> (I don't understand why the typesetter can't just do the pages as
> PDF's, but I am an ignoramus about this stuff.)

Mainly because they are ignorant.

Cheers
Alan



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