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Does anyone know of an easy, effective, and preferably free way to convert Word documents with Mathtype 5.2 equations to the LaTeX format?

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@Qiaochu: Yes. I do. – Asaf Karagila Jul 25 '11 at 23:18
@Asaf please answer – Adi Dani Jul 25 '11 at 23:21
@Adi: I have not worked with MS Word for over five years now, I think. At most I was just printing .doc files for someone else. I cannot possibly answer, I do believe that this is completely off topic, and should be posted/migrated to tex.stackexachange.com instead. – Asaf Karagila Jul 25 '11 at 23:23

migrated from math.stackexchange.com Jul 25 '11 at 23:23

2 Answers

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Save the document as .docx and use XSLT to convert the OOXML in it to LaTeX. Free? Yes. Effective? Absolutely. Easy? Not very: it requires a detailed understanding of MathML and OOXML.

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I very much doubt that Word converts Mathtype objects into MathML, they are probably just kept as opaque blobs, which would make your solution a no-go. – Tomek Jul 26 '11 at 0:03
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You may try OpenOffice or LibreOffice as an intermediary format and export to LaTeX from there. OO can handle MS Equation Editor format, not sure about Mathtype though (didn't work for me the last time I tried), maybe there are some plugins around for that.

Alternatively, if you have Mathtype installed, you can convert all equations to LaTeX in Word and then go OO -> LaTeX for the rest + some text post-processing for the equations.

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This may also be relevant if using OO as an intermediate step: extensions.services.openoffice.org/en/project/writer2latex – Ben Crowell Jul 26 '11 at 1:15
I know it doesn't work with MS Word 2007's equation editor, since OpenOffice's Writer considers a document with only an equation in it as a blank document. :( However, it may work for older versions of MS Word. – Werner Jul 26 '11 at 2:01

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