[texhax] status of *.tex to *.doc conversion ?

[Juergen Fenn]

John Palmer <johnp at palmyra.uklinux.net> writes:

> Apologies if I'm being ignorant but I guess converting TeX to RTF is a
> better strategy than to attempt to directly create Word .doc files, which
> are a bit of a black secret.  

This is true in the first place because TeX -> RTF converts one makup
language into another. The best free converter from RTF to DOC is
probably OOo. Since OOo is open source its DOC export filter should be
no 'black secret' any more. However, there are no free converters for
TeX -> DOC. tex2word is said to be working rather well generally
(according to an article in the journal of DANTE a while ago), but it
is nonfree. This is why we have to go via RTF to DOC -- or via HTML.

> Is there a dvi2rtf program or project ?

Not to my knowledge. See 

  http://www.tug.org/utilities/texconv/pctotex.html
  http://www.tug.org/utilities/texconv/textopc.html

for an overview of converters between (La)TeX and word processors.

Regards,
Jürgen.