Cut and Paste Non-Math Text from MS Word to a .tex file

Question

I am helping a friend use LaTeX to generate a book of short stories. The stories are received from the authors in MS Word -- unfortunately that is only text editor most of the world knows. There is no math content to worry about, just plain text. However, Word likes to convert some plain text into other characters: The two that I have noticed so far are the quotes and ....

I tried the suggested approach of using inputenc without any success even with various input encoding. I am using \inputencoding as opposed to a package option as I feel as if I might need to change them between various stories.

So, what is the suggested approach to handle this? Ideally, I'd prefer to have some way of mapping these characters to the appropriate LaTeX friendly ones.

Notes:

• I personally don't like leaving the smart quotes as there are cases where the authors have missed a closing quote and then all the subsequent quotes are incorrect. If this is caught early on, it can easily be corrected in the Word doc before pasting into a .tex file. But often, the editor has made significant edits to the .tex file before this problem is noticed. Hence, the preference to have csquotes handle this problem rather than using the specific open and close quotes.

References

• How to make apostrophes appear normally when copy-pasting from a MS Word document? provides a script to do a one time conversion of some characters, but I'd prefer to keep those intact in the source .tex file if possible.

• I found this to be a good reference on fontenc vs inputenc.

Code:

\documentclass{article}
\usepackage{inputenc}
\usepackage{csquotes}
\MakeOuterQuote{"}

%\inputencoding{utf8}
%\inputencoding{latin1}
%\inputencoding{ansinew}
\inputencoding{cp1252}

\begin{document}

"It's too late now…" (should have \ldots\ before end quote)

“Please, sir, don’t.”  (should have left and right quotes)
\end{document}

Answer 1

Regarding the inputenc question

Your example works without problem if I copy it in an utf8-document and declare the inputenc encoding accordingly as utf8. Ditto with ansinew.

I can't really imagine how you could get the output in your image -- it can be created but imho not with the standard files. None of them would replace non-ascii chars with question marks.

Regarding quotes

Straight quotes (") are active in german tex documents and used for a lot of useful things like adding break points and hyphens. So I would never use them for real quotes and I prefer word files with smart quotes. When copying from word with (german) smart quotes to tex I use \MakeAutoQuote{„}{“} in the tex document. As such quotes creates a group I get warnings or errors if the smart quotes in word document are not correctly balanced which avoids most errors. But word files are never perfect and so an simple copy & paste is never enough. One always has to read and check the result.

Answer 2

this is the kind of job I use to do sometimes. Well, there are few tools you can use for solve this. Maybe the best and automatic way is with pandoc, but sincerely the truth is that I have not tested enough and have not had a satisfactory experience with it yet. Another choice is to do what @Bernard suggests.

Formerly I used AbiWord for open doc files and export int LateX, it was not a nice solution for me because doesn't respect the document structure and all the diacritics are coded in ascii mode. Bot perhaps for a short text in english could be a good option.

What works best in my experience and I like to pass text from Word to LaTeX is Sublime Text 2. Yes, perhaps for others is stupid and not the best solution, much less automatic, but it works pretty well.

The first advantage I find is that allows you to handle with encodings. You can open a file using the encoding you want (or almost) and re-encode it to whatever you need, usually I spend all to utf8. You can still reopen it or save it with encoding you need and not get weird symbols such as when you try with Texmaker. (In this case I have it set to utf8 and whenever I open a file let me know if it is in another encoding).

The second advantage has to do with the color schemes and the syntax. By default uses a pretty scheme called Monokai, I use to switch to Monokai bright (the difference is the color used for the highlighted selections, in Monokai bright is orange instead the gray by default). The syntax for LaTeX is very comfortable to the eyes and also let us detect easily the quotation marks. Surelly we can achieve the same in vim or emacs but here is very easy. If whe have the common and wrong quotation marks " then Sublime Text with this color scheme highlight the text between in a lively pink color. So is very easy to see where we have to make corrections. Unfortunately if the author or the editor forget to close the quotes, we don't see them in color, but the editr allow us to find them all easily yet. When the quotes are right composed in the ascii mode: `` '' we'll see the text in yellow instead of white.

The third advantage has to do with the simultaneous use of cursors in real time, and the use of regular expressions that allows to quickly correct many things, for example the ellipsis. You can select the ... writed in Word and using [Ctrl]+[D] ([Cmd]+[D] in Mac) for select all occurrences in the document, and once selected change it to \ldots just writing it. So the change is not in one but in all selections at once. Fast and easy.

You don't need any special tool for achieve this, but you can also enhance the editor for compile directly on it if you want or for get more tools, yopu can do that installing the Package Control and with it easily get LaTeXTool package and another.

I know that this editor is very popular among people who do web, but I think for LaTeX also has some interesting features, try it and see if it convinces you.

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Addenda

For achieve correctly all this I told before, I usually use both packages: inpuntenc(with utf8) and fontenc(with T1 is enought for western european languages without maths).

Answer 3

Pandoc is a command-line tool that can covert docx files to LaTeX files. As for dealing with ellipses and quote marks, I think that the best way to handle those is using the search and replace function in your LaTeX editor.