grumble grumble grumble

[kaberett]

I am at the stage I eventually get to with every paper to date, where my supervisors want to Look At It and are Not Interested in dealing with LaTeX, where I much prefer to work in it, so now I'm gradually moving everything over into LibreOffice with reference to about three different files, and I know I bring this on myself but I really prefer LaTeX for early drafting.

Comments

[silveradept]

I gather from the comments that there are no easy conversion tools between LaTeX and the more conventional office documents. Which seems a shame and an oddity.

[cesy]

Yes, this. Surely someone has invented a decent LaTeX to .docx converter by now? LaTeX is so handy!

[kaberett]

In my experience, (1) converters tend to get most of the text, but drop formatting and unusual characters on the floor (because they're basically running OCR over the PDF), and (2) my supervisor can't open .docx usefully because she's running a decade-old version of Office for Mac.

(It's possible that I exaggerate slightly with the "decade", but not by much.)

[kaberett]

Having said which, TeX4HT might do what I need it to...

[mdlbear]

Or look into latex2html.

[mdlbear]

Basically script the process of LaTeX -> HTML -> Word/LibreOffice. IIRC Libreoffice can be run in batch mode from a command line. Trying to extract text in any useful form from a PDF that TeX has generated is hopeless -- a lot of TeX's adjustments for kerning etc. get mixed in with the text stream.

latex2html -split 0 -no_navigation -info 0 whatever.tex