Tuesday, November 8, 2022

LaTeX to Word

Often I have a document in LaTeX, and somebody else needs an editable copy in Word. Here is a list of hacks I have learnt to use:

1. If the document is relatively free of math and figures then the simplest course is often to compile a PDF, and "import" the PDF into MS Word. This works out remarkably well in many cases.

2. The same thing above applies to figures. You can now directly drop PDF images into a Word doc.

3. If you have lots of equations, then it is worthwhile to use pandoc

pandoc mydoc.tex -o mydoc.docx

More sophisticated options to copy cross-references, and bibliography exist. See this as well.

4. Many journals accept PDF figures. If they need TIFF, then you can use Adobe Acrobat online to do this conversion. In my experience, this produces smaller files compared to other automatic converters including ImageMagick.