Table des matières

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.

To LaTeX, from...

troff

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).

WordPerfect

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).

RTF

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.

LibreOffice/OpenOffice

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)

Microsoft Word (doc/docx)

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

PDF

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

Microsoft Excel

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

Runoff is probably obsolete.

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

refer/tib

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.

From LaTeX to...

LibreOffice or Microsoft Word

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.
Note that LibreOffice itself is not on CTAN; see https://www.libreoffice.org/ or http://www.openoffice.org/, though most Linux systems offer it as a ready-to-install bundle.

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

Microsoft Word (other routes)

RTF

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

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).

Converters supporting multiple formats

SGML

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.

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

Pandoc

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.


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