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I'm in the process of converting some Word documents to latex. I decided to go the following route:

Word -> ODF (with odf export or via libreoffice) -> latex (writer2latex).

The documents generated by writer2latex do look quite good, unfortunately, writer2latex creates what seems like a million different styles for every individual text element. Is there a way that I can minimize the amount of styles created? I understand that using the option clean or ultraclean will remove any styling, however, then I end up having to go through the entire document again, and apply styling manually. Is there a clever way around this?

And also: is there a way to convince writer2latex to use \chapter and not \section as the top level category?

Any advice regarding these issues is greatly appreciated!!

EDIT: The entire project is ~ 250-300 pages, made of 10 independent word documents.

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How big and how many documents do you have? If the answer is "Small and not many." then I'd recommend a copy and paste job into a book class that you like. This is a bit of a naff solution though, so just a comment. ;) – Mark S. Everitt Dec 4 '11 at 9:44
250 pages in total. roughly 10 documents. that's why copy & paste isn't the most straightforward solution. – memyself Dec 4 '11 at 9:46
Ouch, that would be a rubbish way to do it then! – Mark S. Everitt Dec 4 '11 at 9:47
What kinds of styles do your odt documents use? – Erik Dec 4 '11 at 19:30
nothing fancy. I tried to clean up the document as much as possible in word, using the predefined styles (header 1, header 2, ...) – memyself Dec 4 '11 at 20:36

1 Answer

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To use \chapter instead of \section you could do a simple search&replace with sed or an editor that supports regular expressions. Here is the command you need for sed:

sed -e 's/^\\section{\([^}]*\)}$/\\chapter{\1}/' whatever.tex
sed -e 's/^\\subsection{\([^}]*\)}$/\\section{\1}/' whatever.tex
# etc.
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that's not a solution, because it means that I then need to replace all sections with subsections, all subsections with subsubsections, etc. – memyself Dec 4 '11 at 19:45
@memyself, what's wrong with doing that? You can apply the same principle to all heading levels -- until you reach the lowest one latex can handle, but you obviously cannot translate those properly anyway. Just make sure to replace the higher levels first. – Erik Dec 4 '11 at 20:08
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A better regex would be sed -e 's/\\section\>/\\chapter/g; s/\\\(sub\)*subsection\>/\\\1section/g' which takes care of all levels (except paragraph) in one go. – Aditya Dec 4 '11 at 23:35

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