[lug] LaTeX to Word Doc/RTF

[J. Wayde Allen]

On Mon, 18 Feb 2002, Chip Atkinson wrote:

> Star office will save to three versions of MSWord format.  If you have
> soffice, you should be set.

Yes and no ... I believe the original poster indicated that the LaTeX to
RTF conversion was causing his copy of soffice to crash.  I've not tried
doing this, so can't say what the problem might be.

I would agree from the point of view of a resume that most of this should
be reasonably moot.  After all, a LaTeX documents source form is pure
ASCII and could simply be loaded into MSWord, Star Office, etc., and
relatively quickly formated any way one desires.  If this takes a long
time, the resume is either too long or there is too much special
formating.  For larger documents, the conversion from LaTeX to MSWord is a
bit more problematic.

I do think that there is a definite interest in being able to convert
LaTeX documents to MSWord form.  This is getting to be a more common
request, and even surprisingly I've seen it coming from some magazine
publishers lately.  One of the nice features of using a document
processing system such as LaTeX, is the ability to process the source to
create the target form needed (dvips, pdfelatex, etc.).  Unfortunately
I've yet to find a good way of processing LaTeX to MSWord.  This makes it
increasingly difficult to defend my use of LaTeX in an environment
dominated by the word processor.  (By the way, LaTex -> HTML -> MSWord is
NOT a good way to go.)

This has also raised a number of questions in my mind:

   - Is LaTeX simply getting to be too old?  

   - Is Docbook a better choice today?

   - What about SGML and/or XML based systems?  

   - Are the word processors moving towards the adoption of an SGML based
     storage format?  If so, what are the Linux options (docbook, jade,
     etc.)?

I've been juggling these questions a bit lately since I need to start
working on another research paper, and am debating whether to use LaTeX as
I'm inclined to do, or to consider moving to a new format.

- Wayde
  (wallen at lug.boulder.co.us)

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                        ISART 2002                          
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