How can I convert from Microsoft Word to a LaTeX document

Question

I am a final year graduate student and I have my thesis (about 350 pages) in Microsoft Word format. I would like to convert the document into a LaTeX "camera" ready PDF. Is there any easy way to do this? I am very new to LateX..

Answer 1

New version of writer2latex is pretty good. It works with the Open Office, but I think their command line utility should work without the OO. You can set quality of the converted document - from LaTeX as clean as possible, to version which tries to emulate appearance of source word document.

Structure and basic formatting should be converted well, but I am not sure about math, as there are big differences in math between Word and OO.

Answer 2

The free open source word processor AbiWord has an MS Word import function, and, if you install it (be sure to check it under install time, or if on Linux, install the necessary plugin package), a LaTeX export function. It works decently well for simple documents.

I personally prefer it to the other options, including writer2latex.

Another tool I've tried and had some success with is rtf2latex2e for converting rtf to latex. (You can export to RTF from Word of course.)

As has already been made clear, you can't expect perfection from any of these methods, and it'll require a lot of hand-fixing.

Converting Documents to LaTeX is a blog post I wrote listing and comparing different methods. Perhaps you'll find it useful.

Answer 3

This isn't technically an answer to the question you asked, but it looks from your question that you may have a misunderstanding.

Latex is a type setting language, and through programs such as pdflatex, you can turn this into a pdf file. It is certainly not the only way to create a pdf file. If creating a pdf from your word file is your ultimate goal, then there are much more sensible ways to do this.

You can pay for adobe professional. They may even have a free pdf conversion tool, not sure about that. There is a free tool called PDFcreater:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/pdfcreator/

When installed, this will become a print driver on your computer. Basically you go into Word, and tell it to print your document and then select PDFcreator as your printer. It will go through various options and ultimately create your pdf for you.

You may want to check though that everything has come out properly. I have known objects to move about and gradients to come out wrongly during a conversion, but it may be all fine.

Hope this helps

Answer 4

You can't convert MS Word document to LaTeX directly. The two formats are rather incompatible. Last time I had to do it (a 4-page paper written by my Prof) I saved it as text-only and readded all formatting, math, images and tables manually. As you can guess it was quite an effort which is not doable for a 350 pages document, except in the unlikely case that it would really be all text with minimal formatting (some arts thesis maybe?).

Have also a look on What is the best way to make the transition from Microsoft Word to LaTeX? or on Convert TeX to non-TeX and back, but I don't think you will get away easy with this task in any case.

Answer 5

This is probably a bit too late, but 350 pages of conversion is a lot. You could try the following tools people have suggested above such as WordtoLatex, writer2latex or rtf2latex2e, but I doubt you will be able to go through all 350 pages without any hassle. Especially with tables, images and all. It might though take you a month to do this carefully!

If you have completed all the 350 pages in word (man, that should have taken long!), then I'd recommend using one of the paid services available and just get it converted. You could try maybe Word to Latex, Gauss-Newton or something similar although I agree it is hard to find one!