Conversion between (La)TeX and others

troff

troff-to-latex (available as support/troff-to-latex), written by Kamal Al-Yahya at Stanford University (California, USA), assists in the translation of a troff document into LaTeX format. It recognises most -ms and -man macros, plus most eqn and some tbl preprocessor commands. Anything fancier needs to be done by hand. Two style files are provided. There is also a man page (which converts very well to LaTeX...). The program is copyrighted but free. An enhanced version of this program, tr2latex, is available in support/tr2latex

The DECUS TeX distribution (see sources of software) also contains a program which converts troff to TeX.

WordPerfect

wp2latex (available as support/wp2latex) is a PC program written in Turbo Pascal by R. C. Houtepen at the Eindhoven University in the Netherlands. It converts WordPerfect 5.0 documents to LaTeX. Pascal source is included. Users find it ``helpful'' and ``decent'' in spite of some limitations. It gets high marks for handling font changes, but cannot make indices, tables of contents, margins or graphics, and can't handle features new in WordPerfect version 5.1, in particular the equation formatter. The program is copyrighted but free.

Glenn Geers of the University of Sydney, Australia (glenn@qed.physics.su.oz.au) is translating wp2latex into C and adding some WordPerfect 5.1 features, in particular its equation handling. His work is in the glenn subdirectory of support/wp2latex

PC-Write

pcwritex.arc, from support/pcwritex, is a print driver for PC-Write that ``prints'' a PC-Write V2.71 document to a TeX-compatible disk file. It was written by Peter Flynn at University College, Cork, Republic of Ireland.

runoff

Peter Vanroose's (vanroose@esat.kuleuven.ac.be) conversion program is written in VMS Pascal. The sources and a VAX executable are available from support/rnototex

refer/tib

There are a few programs for converting bibliographic data between BibTeX and refer/tib formats. They are in biblio/bibtex/utils/refer-tools

In spite of the directory name, it also contains a shell script to convert BibTeX to refer as well. The collection is not maintained.

RTF

A program for converting Microsoft's Rich Text Format to TeX is available in support/rtf2tex, which was written and is maintained by Robert Lupton (rhl@astro.princeton.edu). There is also a convertor to LaTeX by Erwin Wechtl, in support/rtf2latex

Translation to RTF may be done (for a somewhat constrained set of LaTeX documents) by TeX2RTF, which can produce ordinary RTF, Windows Help RTF (as well as HTML, conversion to HTML). TeX2RTF is supported on various Unix platforms and under Windows 3.1; it is available from support/tex2rtf

Microsoft Word

A rudimentary program for converting MS-Word to LaTeX is wd2latex, for MS-DOS (dviware/wd2latex); a better idea, however, is to convert the document to RTF format and use one of the RTF converters mentioned above.

A FAQ that deals specifically with conversions between TeX-based formats and word processor formats is regularly posted to comp.text.tex, is available via http://www.kfa-juelich.de/isr/1/texconv.html and is archived as help/wp-conv/texcnven.txt

A group at Ohio State University (USA) is working on a common document format based on SGML, with the ambition that any format could be translated to or from this one. FrameMaker provides ``import filters'' to aid translation from alien formats (presumably including TeX) to Framemaker's own.