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Converters from LaTeX to PC Textprocessors - Overview

Switch conversion direction: From PC to LaTeX

Author: Wilfried Hennings (W.Hennings "at" fz-juelich.de), Forschungszentrum (Research Center) Jülich GmbH
this page last updated on April 1, 2004
The url of this page is http://tug.org/utilities/texconv/textopc.html

To all PC users of the TeXconv FAQ pages:
Help! My and some other TeX experts' and companies' email addresses are continuously flooded with virus laden mails.
PLEASE check your systems with a virus scanner, remove the viruses, and from now on use a resident virus scanning engine and update virus data files at least twice a week.
If you don't want this, please remove my email address from all your address books!!!

I maintain these pages because I need converters between LaTeX and PC Textprocessors for my work and I want to share the information with others who need it. Because I maintain them in my spare time (uh, what is spare time?), I can not answer individual questions.

This list is as good or as bad as its support, and I need YOUR support to update and supplement this list. Please supplement if you know more and/or better ones. There are some more converters on the CTAN sites, but the following seem to be most promising for conversion to and from the current versions of wordprocessors.

Neither correctness nor completeness is guaranteed.
All opinions mentioned (if any) are my own, not my employer's. Please send corrections, enhancements and supplements (auch in deutscher Sprache) to the following address:
W.Hennings "at" fz-juelich.de

Note that this FAQ list contains information about converters ONLY between LaTeX and PC word processors. Converters to and from other formats may have own FAQ lists - e.g. see the link for converters to and from HTML.

For the impatient, here is a table with overview of features of the most recent converters.

General Remarks

Before looking for a converter, stop and think about a principal question:

What do you want to be converted in which way?

Do you want to convert the document structure, i.e. a heading should remain a heading, a list should remain a list etc., no matter how it will look like in the target format?
Or do you want to convert the appearance, i.e. how it looks like, no matter how it is represented in the target format?
Or do you want a mixture of both?
For using SGML as an intermediate format, you would have to specify the translation rules yourself (as far as I understood). This makes sense, and explains why different people have very different opinions about which converter best fits their needs: They simply have different demands and expectations on what should be converted and how.
So, not only practically there is no converter which is good for everyone and every purpose, but this is even principally impossible because there are no well-defined requirements which a converter should meet.

An additional problem is that TeX/LaTeX can be extended by an unlimited number of macros. Unless the converter contains a full-scale TeX system, it can at best support the publicly available macro commands, not the ones privately written by individual users. There has not yet been an attempt to use TeX itself for producing a textprocessor compatible output, and I don't know whether this would be even principally possible.

So the best you can expect is that a converter supports the standard LaTeX commands and perhaps a few more widely used packages.

So keep this in mind when looking through the following list of converters, try yourself and decide what you need.

There are several ways to convert.

To illustrate these, let me restrict it to the Microsoft Word case:

use a Word import filter
use a Word macro: load LaTeX file as plain text, then search for LaTeX markup and replace the markup by formatting, special characters and equations.
use an external converter:

LaTeX -> RTF (Word ASCII format), then use Word's own RTF import),
LaTeX -> HTML, then use Word's internet assistant or built-in html converter,
maybe other external format(s).

The converters being most complete and currently maintained / supported are:

TeX2Word - a shareware import filter for MS Word

latex2rtf - a free standalone LaTeX -> RTF converter for PC, Macintosh and Unix,

TexPort - a commercial TeX/LaTeX to WordPerfect and Microsoft Word converter for PC.

TeX4ht - a free LaTeX to html or XML converter for PC and Unix produces html which is good for loading into Word. TeX4ht relies on other software, it needs at least a full TeX system.

There are also converters to Powerpoint and to FrameMaker (see further below).

Use a Word import filter

TeX2Word: Chikrii Softlab http://www.tex2word.com/ Shareware, 99$ (45$ academic).
Current version: 2.0, released March 2003.
Support for more document styles and packages will be available with future versions. You can also supply support for document styles, packages and user defined macros by yourself (needs TeX programming knowledge).
Needs:
* MS Windows 95 or later (NT4, ME, Win2000, WinXP),
* MS Word 95 or later (97, 2000, XP) and
* MathType 4 or later (full version of the Equation Editor which comes with MS Word).

Convert to RTF

Free:

The next two converters are based on the latex2rtf converter which was originally developed by a group of students supervised by Ralf Schlatterbeck at TU Wien (Vienna). Unfortunately, two different persons, not knowing of each other, had taken over this version and started implementing more features.

latex2rtf: LaTeX-to-RTF-converter. See the more detailed page.

ltx2rtf: LaTeX-to-RTF-converter. See the more detailed page
Nearly all features now merged into latex2rtf (see above).

LEQ: LaTeX-to-Word converter. Requires Python (free) and MS Word. See LEQ homepage. Translates TeX equations to Word's formula fields first. If double-clicked in Word, a formula field will be converted to an equation editor object, but I have some bad experiences with this conversion from EQ fields to equation editor objects.

TeX2RTF is not intended as an all-purpose converter but to produce printed manuals as well as online help from a single LaTeX source (with a limited subset of LaTeX commands). See TeX2RTF homepage (UK site)

Convert to WordPerfect format

Commercial:

TexPort converts your TeX and LaTeX files to WordPerfect or Microsoft Word documents. KTALK's home page (USA)

Use a Word macro

Free:

tex2doc, by Thomas Link: LaTeX to WinWord 6 and WinWord 7(95) converter, written as Word macros. Also attempts to convert tables!

ltx2word, by myself: LaTeX to WinWord 6, WinWord 7(95) and WinWord 97 converter, written as Word macros. No tables yet.

Use a Powerpoint add-in

TexPoint enables the easy use of Latex symbols and formulas in Powerpoint presentations. See homepage. Latest version requires Powerpoint2000, does not work with earlier versions.

HTML as intermediate format

LaTeX to HTML

Because HTML is a structured format, the conversion between HTML and LaTeX is rather straightforward. However there remain the limitations of HTML compared to LaTeX, i.e. there are many elements in LaTeX which can not (yet?) be represented in HTML. Converters from LaTeX to HTML are:

Recommended if you have TeX installed or don't mind to install it: TeX4ht is a highly configurable TeX-based converter to hypertext. It comes with a built-in default setting for plain TeX, LaTeX and TeXinfo, and it generates html with accompanying css stylesheet. The converter needs a full TeX installation, but this gives the advantage that TeX's full support for macros and styles is available (with a few exceptions) and need not be implemented in the converter.
Equations are converted to either bitmaps or MathML. There are some different MathML flavors around which can be chosen by an option.
The special command
oolatex
is available for producing xhtml compatible with OpenOffice (formerly StarOffice).
A command of the form
htlatex filename "html,word" "symbol/!"
asks for HTML output tuned toward MicroSoft Word. Such a format, however, relies on bitmaps for mathematical formulas.
Conversion to bitmaps additionally needs Ghostscript and ImageMagic or netpbm.

tth (US site): LaTeX-to-HTML converter which translates LaTeX into HTML3.2 markup. Formulae are also translated into standard html markup. A version which translates maths to MathML is in the testing phase.

ltoh (US site): LaTeX-to-HTML converter which is highly customizable, i.e. you can define how the LaTeX macros which are used in your document are to be translated.

HEVEA (FR site): LaTeX-to-HTML converter which translates LaTeX into HTML4.0 markup. Formulae are also translated into standard html markup (not yet using MathML).

Hyperlatex allows the use of a subset of LaTeX to produce documents in HTML .

Some converters are available from CTAN ("Comprehensive TeX Archive Network"), e.g. in .../support/latex2html.
(The ... stands for a host specific base directory, which often is either "/pub/tex" or "/tex-archive")

HTML to Wordprocessor

Word 8 (97) and up contain the html converter by default (but its installation may have to be explicitly chosen during the Word setup in user-defined mode).
For Word 6 and 7 (95) for Windows and Mac there are free HTML converters available from Microsoft:
Download... IA for Word 6 / IA for Word 7 (95) / IA for Word for Mac

WordPerfect 7 and up have an integrated InternetPublisher.
For WordPerfect 6.1 for Windows, the InternetPublisher is available separately:
Download... InternetPublisher for WPWin 6.1

Other intermediate formats

There are ways to use SGML as intermediate format, and others have used it successfully. Having had a quick look at it, I found it rather complicated, especially it seems that you have to define the translation rules yourself. So I did not put more effort in trying to use it. If anyone can give me a ready-to-use cookbook solution, I will include it here.

An upcoming format is XML, a subset of which can be exported and imported by Microsoft Office 2000 and up, OpenOffice uses it as its native format, and the browser programmers are working on implementing XML. It actually is an instance of SGML. As it is more powerful than HTML, conversion from LaTeX to XML would lose much less information than conversion from LaTeX to HTML. There are good chances that it could be used as a general exchange format in the future. TeX4ht already has scripts for converting to XML (TEI or DOCBOOK) but Word 2000 can not import that. For producing output compatible to MS Word, convert to html+css using the xwtex and xwlatex scripts.

Most astonishing, one could also use PDF as intermediate format. Generating PDF from LaTeX is straightforward if you have a full TeX implementation installed. If you also have the full commercial version of Adobe Acrobat, the commercial software BCLDrake can convert PDF to RTF which can be opened by Word and other wordprocessors. See http://www.bcltechnologies.com/products/drake/drake.htm.

Convert to FrameMaker

la2mml: converts LaTeX to FrameMaker format. Maybe outdated, latest version was created Nov. 1995. homepage

FrameMaker Utilities (UK site): Contains converters for both directions (LaTeX <-> FrameMaker) as well as templates which make conversion from Framemaker to LaTeX more easy

it must remain intact and the contents unchanged; if you'd like to have something changed, contact me (W.Hennings "at" fz-juelich.de). Reformatting (e.g. from HTML to some other presentation format) is granted as long as the contents are unchanged.
you may NOT ask money for it except a reasonable cost for media and distribution

Please also note the disclaimer.