Other conversions to and from (La)TeX

This page lists converters to and from LaTeX, as of May 6, 2021.

This list is not complete. Some older converters, which are still available on the internet but have rather limited capabilities, e.g. only support the older word .doc format, are not listed. The list also contains no recommendations.

Tr2latex assists in the translation of a troff document into LaTeX 2.09 format. It recognises most -ms and -man macros, plus most eqn and some tbl preprocessor commands. Anything fancier needs to be done by hand. Two style files are provided. There is also a man page (which converts very well to LaTeX…). Tr2latex is an enhanced version of the earlier troff-to-latex (which is no longer available).

wp2latex is actively maintained, and is available either for Windows or for Unix systems: http://www.penguin.cz/%7Efojtik/wp2latex/wp2latex.htm

Open source, GPLv2. Latest version: 3.96 (2021-04-27).

rtf2latex2e, by Ujwal Sathyam and Scott Prahl: https://sourceforge.net/projects/rtf2latex2e/

Open source, GPL. Latest version: 2.2.3 (2016-09-17).
It will only convert RTF as saved from Word 2010 and earlier. RTF saved from the newer versions of Word contains tags which cause rtf2latex2e to segfault. Development of it seems to have stalled.

Writer2LaTeX: http://writer2latex.sourceforge.net/

Requires: OpenOffice or LibreOffice, and Java.
Open source, LGPL. Latest versions: stable 1.6.1 (2018-10-19), snapshot 1.9.3 alpha (2018-10-19)

• docx2tex: https://github.com/transpect/docx2tex/
  

Open source BSD 2-Clause “Simplified” License. Latest version: 1.6 (2021-01-25).
Requires: Java 1.7 up to 1.14.

• wordtolatex: http://www.wordtolatex.com/ (commercial).

• word2latex https://www.word2latex.net/ (commercial).

• Word-to-Latex https://www.grindeq.com (commercial).

• docx2latex https://www.docx2latex.com/ (commercial).

• word2tex https://www.chikrii.com/products/word2tex/ (commercial).

Acrobat Reader (version 5.0 and later) or PDF Exchange Editor will output rather feeble files that Word can read.

Excel2Latex converts an Excel file into a LaTeX tabular environment; it comes as a .xla file which defines some Excel macros to produce output in a new format. https://github.com/krlmlr/Excel2LaTeX

LaTeX Project Public License, version 1.3 or later. Latest version: 3.5.0 (2017-07-15).

Also online conversion: http://excel2latex.com/.

Runoff is probably obsolete.

Peter Vanroose's rnototex conversion program is written in VMS Pascal. The sources are distributed with a VAX executable.

There are a few programs for converting bibliographic data between BibTeX and refer/tib formats. The collection includes a shell script converter from BibTeX to refer format as well. The collection is not maintained.

The current preferred free-software method is a two-stage process:

1. convert LaTeX to OpenOffice format, using the tex4ht command oolatex;
2. open the result in LibreOffice or OpenOffice and “save as” a MS-Word document.

tex4ht can also generate OpenOffice ODT format, which may be used as an intermediate to producing Microsoft Word format files.

• tex2word: https://hunyadi.info.hu/levente/en/tex2word. Open source, GPL. Latest version: 2016-03-22 (development stalled).

• LaTeXML: https://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/. Open source, Creative Commons 0: “No Rights Reserved” (GPL compatible). Latest version: 0.8.5 (2020-11-17).

• tex2word: https://www.chikrii.com/products/tex2word/ (commercial).

• LaTeX-to-Word: https://www.grindeq.com/ (commercial).

• Convert LaTeX via PDF: Acrobat Reader (version 5.0 and later) or PDF Exchange Editor will output rather feeble files that Word can read.

latex2rtf: http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/.

Open source, GPL. Latest version: 2.3.18 (2020-06-23).
Converts only a limited subset of LaTeX markup; development stalled.

FrameMaker provides “import filters” to aid translation from alien formats (presumably including TeX) to FrameMaker 's own. Also see http://webhome.cs.uvic.ca/~nigelh/fm2latex.html (latest update 2015) and http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~kjt/software/framemaker/#la_mml (latest update 2019).

A group at Ohio State University (USA) is working on a common document format based on SGML, with the ambition that any format could be translated to or from this one.

If it's related to the paper Difficulties in parsing SGML, that may be very old news.

https://pandoc.org/

Open source, GPL. Latest version: 2.13 (2021-03-21).
Pandoc can convert between numerous markup and word processing formats, including, but not limited to, various flavors of Markdown, HTML, LaTeX and Word docx. Pandoc can also produce PDF output. Pandoc’s enhanced version of Markdown includes syntax for tables, definition lists, metadata blocks, footnotes, citations, math (only the new Office Math, not equation editor/MathType), and much more – but no pictures.

Sources:

• Other conversions to and from (La)TeX,
• Wilfried Hennings' FAQ (as of June 14, 2012; now considered obsolete).