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.