Re: Word-to-LaTex on linux?

["David C. Walden" <dave@walden-family.com>]

>On Mon, Jul 07, 2008 at 11:31:19AM +0200, Piotr Kopszak wrote:
> > Has anyone had any success running Word-to-Latex converter, mentioned 
> on contextgarden, on linux? In theory it should be possible using wine 
> and winetricks.

I have converted from Word to LaTeX a lot! -- book length
documents.  I usually find it easier to manually do the
conversion: 1) adding commands and inter-paragraph
spacing in the word file where I can still see the visual
formatting; 2) cut and paste the text from the Word file
into WinEdt or EMACS, and 3) use the text editor's
global replace feature to convert en-dashes into --,
smart quotes into `` and '', etc.  I have occasionally
whipped together a small editor macro to do repetitive
tasks during the conversion.  I find that this
approach takes less time (or at least less mental
anguish) than learning a conversion program and then
fixing its output.  If have always thought that I
might find a conversion program useful if my documents included
much math (they don't) -- until someone else in this thread
suggested that the conversion program didn't work so well
for the math.  My approach noted above is in the context
having used a couple of different conversion programs in
the past -- one freeware and one commercial.  Of course,
I have been writing, debugging, and rewriting computer
programs for decades, so tweaking things with a text
editor feels like a pretty natural approach to me.


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