Stephen Royle

Here's a quick tech tip. We've been writing papers in TeX recently,
using
[Overleaf](http://quantixed.org/2017/01/24/tips-from-the-blog-xi-overleaf/)
as a way to write collaboratively. This works great but sometimes, a
Word file is required by the publisher. So how do you convert from one
to the other quickly and with the least hassle?

If you Google this question (as I did), you will find a number of
suggestions which vary in the amount of effort required. Methods include
latex2rtf or pandoc. Here's what worked for me:

- Exporting the TeX file as PDF from Overleaf
- Opening it in Microsoft Word
- That was it!

OK, that wasn't quite it. It did not work at all on a Mac. I had to use
a Windows machine running Word. The formatting was maintained and the
pictures imported OK. Note that this was a short article with three
figures and hardly any special notation (it's possible this doesn't work
as well on more complex documents). A couple of corrections were needed:
hyphenation at the end of the line was deleted during the import which
borked actual hyphenated words which happened to span two lines; and the
units generated by siunitx were missing a space between the number and
unit. Otherwise it was pretty straightforward. So straightforward that I
thought I'd write a quick post in case it helps other people.

**What about going the other way?**

Again, on Windows I used Apache OpenOffice to open my Word document and
save it as an otd file. I then used
the [writer2latex](http://writer2latex.sourceforge.net) filter to make a
.tex file with all the embedded images saved in a folder. These could
then be uploaded to Overleaf. With a bit of formatting work, I was
up-and-running.

I had heard that many publishers, even those that say that they accept
manuscripts as TeX files actually require a Word document for
typesetting. This is because, I guess, they have workflows set up to
make the publisher version which must start with a Word document and
nothing else. What's more worrying is that in these cases, if you don't
supply one, they will convert it for you before putting into the
workflow. It's probably better to do this yourself and check the
conversion to reduce errors at the proof stage.

---

The post title is taken from "In A Word" the compilation album by
Nottingham noise-rockers Fudge Tunnel.


Here’s a quick tech tip. We’ve been writing papers in TeX recently, using Overleaf as a way to write collaboratively. This works great but sometimes, a Word file is required by the publisher. So how do you convert from one to the other quickly and with the least hassle? If you Google this question (as I did), you will find a number of suggestions which vary in the amount of effort required. Methods include latex2rtf or pandoc.

Messaggi di Rogue Scholar

In a Word: LaTeX to Word and vice versa