Word2TeX: What Is That?

Word2TeX is a converter designed in order to use with Microsoft Word and enables Microsoft Word to save documents in LaTeX format. This gives the opportunity to convert existing Microsoft Word documents to LaTeX and to create new LaTeX documents right in your mainstream word processor rather than requiring a completely separate editing environment. Using Word2TeX in conjunction with Microsoft Word, you can easily create articles, technical reports, research papers, dissertations and even entire books for such hard and not always comfortable markup-based system as LaTeX. It doesn't, in fact, require that one even learn LaTeX in order to publish LaTeX papers, and so can save students and other newcomers to scientific publishing the long climb up the LaTeX learning curve and also can help LaTeX experts to save their time. Instead of inputting LaTeX commands, you can simply use Equation Editor (or MathType) in Microsoft Word to create equations and you easily click and point to insert a picture or to make a table (for more detailed information please see Word2TeX Features). Then you can convert your document into LaTeX format with the help of Word2TeX. Thus, Word2TeX leverages your investment in Microsoft Word.

What For?
How do I use it?
System Requirements
Acknowledgements

What For?

Why you may need your documents to be in LaTeX format? LaTeX is a de-facto standard in scientific publishing and most scientific publishers accept papers only in LaTeX format. LaTeX documents can be published not only on the paper, but on the Web using, for instance, pdfTeX which compiles TeX/LaTeX documents to PDF (Portable Document Format by Adobe). Read more about Web publishing with PDF in Thomas Merz book "Web Publishing with Acrobat/PDF" (Springer-Verlag, 1997, ISBN 3-540-63762-1), also it is highly recommended to visit BinaryThing.com which runs The ePublishing Network -- network of interrelated sites dedicated to electronic publishing (ePublishing). To see samples of PDF documents created with Word2TeX please see Word2TeX Samples.

How do I use it?

Once Word2TeX installed, its operation is seamless, below is shown a three-step procedure of converting Microsoft Word document to LaTeX:

Start Microsoft Word (if it's not already running), open the document you want to convert by File|Open...;

Invoke File|Save As... dialog box and choose "TeX" format for saving:

Enter a file name for output LaTeX document and click

That's all! I told you it was easy.

You'll say: "OK, what if I need some specific type of LaTeX format, for instance, REVTeX (Physical Society LaTeX)?" -- Word2TeX can be customized to create any type of LaTeX-based format!

System Requirements

In order to install and run Word2TeX, your computer must have:

Microsoft Windows 95 or later (Windows 98, Me, NT, 2000, XP);
The Word2TeX converter is not independent application, but the add-in to Microsoft Word and it requires Microsoft Word 95 or later version (Microsoft Word 97, Word 2000, XP);
A hard disk drive with at least 2 megabytes of free space.

Acknowledgements

Grateful acknowledgements is made to the following persons and organizations:

Alan Hoenig, U.S.A.
Andrij Shvaika, Ukraine
David Raczkowski, U.S.A.
Heinz-Dieter Ecker, HD Ecker Textverarbeitung, Germany
Keiko SHIMIZU, Toshiba Corp., Japan
Robert Klauber, U.S.A.
Thomas Metz, Lund Institute of Technology, Sweden
Wilfried Hennings, Germany
Osamu ABE, Hokkaido University of Education
Mark Van De Vyver, Australia

We apologize if we forgot someone, thank you anyway!