Article: Stretching LaTeX in and out of Microsoft Word

LaTeX is the de-facto standard in scientific publishing, which means that most scientific publishers accept papers only in LaTeX format. LaTeX documents can be published not only on paper, but on the Web using, for instance, pdfTeX, which compiles TeX/LaTeX documents to PDFs.

Word2TeX is a converter which enables Microsoft Word to save documents in LaTeX format. This makes it easy to create articles, technical reports, research papers, dissertations and even entire books for a markup-based system as LaTeX.

That’s great for people who don’t know the LaTeX format, but experts can also benefit from this neat program. Instead of inputting LaTeX commands, you can simply use Equation Editor or MathType in Microsoft Word to create equations. Then you can convert your document into LaTeX format with the help of Word2TeX. You can also take advantage of Microsoft Word’s ability to easily insert a picture or to make a table.

Once Word2TeX is installed, its operation is seamless. Just use File>Save As... and choose “TeX” format for saving. And if you need a specific type of LaTeX format like REVTeX (Physical Society LaTeX), then Word2TeX can be customised to create any type of LaTeX-based format.

To accompany Word2TeX, there’s also TeX2Word, a converter which enables Microsoft Word to open documents in TeX format.

For full information visit

• http://word2tex.adeptscience.co.uk
• http://tex2word.adeptscience.co.uk