Why have I started a new question?
I have studied as many pages here as I can on answers to this question and none have really satisfactory answers. I want to start a new discussion on this problem.
Why is it that important?
If we really believe that TeX/LaTeX is the prince of typesetting and want to convince others of this, then there has to be some kind of pathway to conversion if you already have a large body of work in another system.
Summary of my particular problem
I have a partly written physics text book comprising a collection of very large Word documents with hundreds of graphics and hundreds of MathType equations. Having been converted to TeX/LaTeX I just can't go back to working in Word, in fact my study/work laptop is a microsoft free experiment which is also in the process of becoming Adobe free, which is a trickier prospect. I really need to find a conversion solution for those documents.
The Question
I suppose I should point out that Mac solutions would be preferable but I do have ready access to a Windows machine. Keeping in mind that I have researched this fairly extensively on this site so far, does anyone know of any up to date solutions? I believe in theory it must be possible to at least convert a word document with styles, graphics and MathType equations into a reasonable .tex file that then might still need significant refinement but not massive, fundamental rewriting.
Word's styles must have some kind of specification that could be translated at least partially to LaTeX styles. Various graphics converters exist. MathType has a converter for its equations to LaTeX. These three components combined could surely produce at least a decent starting point for rewriting a large document.
Why this matters to me personally
My text is already 260 A4 pages. With what I've learned as a LaTex user about rules of typesetting associated with research into readability and so on, even with a perfect translation they would have to be reorganised into about 400 pages. This is because there is far too much on each page; far too many words per line, too many complications in the layout of equations and diagrams.
A solution that at least converts headings, paragraph styles, equations and graphics, leaving me to restructure the pages and fine tune would be brilliant.
I'm well aware of the irony of my situation. Why should I expect that someone in a similar situation to me has created a solution to save me the trouble.
Conclusion
Not a final conclusion. I will keep adding to this as the story progresses. So far a solution combining docx2tex and GraphicConverter gets me the diagrams, writer2latex gets me the headings and body text. If I get MathParser working then I need to find a utility that converts MathType equations from Word to MathML. That would get me a significant way towards a worthwhile conversion.
So the problem remains how to batch extract MathType equations from a word document. I can do them one at a time with MathType. The bizarre thing is why Design Science appears to have done such a bad job on the LaTeX export. Their MathML export seems pretty good so if I find a working converter for MathML to LaTeX, the one at a time thing wouldn't be too bad.
However, the commercial solution of Word2TeX, proves that it can be done.
word2tex
from chikrii labs and/orgrindeq
? Both are not free though.writer2latex
by opening the document in OpenOffice Writer first. Looking at the feature list it seems to import images, tables and formulas. Not so sure how the formulas would take the conversion to Writer though, but I guess it should be worth a shot.\section
etc. and you go hardcore copy/paste. but at least there will be some structure.