latex to word? --- OCR?

Question

I write in latex, but I often need to collaborate with others who insist on using MS Word. so, I create my part of the document first in latex, then I convert it to MS-Word and kiss it goodbye. it's a roach motel kind of conversion---it checks in, but it won't check out. and please don't ask me to convert my collaborators. I can't. I wish. but I can't.

now, in the past, I have looked at https://www.tug.org/utilities/texconv/textopc.html but found no good solutions there. I also looked at solutions in Workflow for converting LaTeX into Open Office / MS Word Format and they were a good start.

from what I have seen, the best completely painless effortless way on me, as a user, seems to be to use OCR on the pdf file. It gets a good part of the required MS-Word formatting right. (I find the ones with interim conversion to odt to be not only painful but also having poor results.)

Alas, there is one oddity. I think that typical OCR software tends to ignore the information that pdftotext (from glyph&cog's poppler ubuntu package) can obtain. This is because there are occasional characters that are misrecognized in words.

is there an OCR program that can use the text-based information in pdf files in its scan process, too? has anyone done systematic experimentation on the quality of automated latex -> pdf -> msword (OCR) translations?

Answer 1

Your best option is probably pandoc, that can convert from and to Microsoft Word (docx) and LaTeX (among others).

A sample document such as

% This is a simple sample document.  For more complicated documents take a look in the excersice tab. Note that everything that comes after a % symbol is treated as comment and ignored when the code is compiled.

\documentclass{article} % \documentclass{} is the first command in any LaTeX code.  It is used to define what kind of document you are creating such as an article or a book, and begins the document preamble

\usepackage{amsmath} % \usepackage is a command that allows you to add functionality to your LaTeX code

\title{Simple Sample} % Sets article title
\author{My Name} % Sets authors name
\date{\today} % Sets date for date compiled

% The preamble ends with the command \begin{document}
\begin{document} % All begin commands must be paired with an end command somewhere
    \maketitle % creates title using infromation in preamble (title, author, date)
    
    \section{Hello World!} % creates a section
    
    \textbf{Hello World!} Today I am learning \LaTeX. %notice how the command will end at the first non-alphabet charecter such as the . after \LaTeX
     \LaTeX{} is a great program for writing math. I can write in line math such as $a^2+b^2=c^2$ %$ tells LaTexX to compile as math
     . I can also give equations their own space: 
    \begin{equation} % Creates an equation environment and is compiled as math
    \gamma^2+\theta^2=\omega^2
    \end{equation}
    If I do not leave any blank lines \LaTeX{} will continue  this text without making it into a new paragraph.  Notice how there was no indentation in the text after equation (1).  
    Also notice how even though I hit enter after that sentence and here $\downarrow$
     \LaTeX{} formats the sentence without any break.  Also   look  how      it   doesn't     matter          how    many  spaces     I put     between       my    words.
    
    For a new paragraph I can leave a blank space in my code. 

\end{document} % This is the end of the document

gives, comiled with latex:

Now, if you run

pandoc document.tex -o document.docx

you obtain a .docx document that looks like this:

Not everything will be perfectly preserved, but you will get better results than using OCR, in my opinion and experience.

You can find some more examples at https://pandoc.org/demos.html.

Answer 2

The best to convert a latex file into a msWord file is latex --> pdf --> msWord. You need to take care that you are using msWord 2013 or a higher version. This doesn't alter my graphics. But I lose hyperlinks and it messes with a couple of equations.

To avoid re-writing the messed-up equations, msWord 365 works great. You can use the Equation Editor of msWord 365 in LaTeX mode.

I also have a collaborator who would work only in msWord. After several hits and trials, I found that this is your best way to go.