[texhax] MS Word & Mathtype to TeX

[cornwall_5 at comcast.net]

"Are you sure you aren't just seeing MathType's conversion of the *equations* to TeX code?" 

  

I have no idea, because I have no way of viewing the code as a readable document 

that the conversion spits out afterwards. Well, I mean, I can SEE the ASCII text code, 

and, yes, I can edit it, by clicking the back button, insert, cut, paste, but I have no idea what changes 

those edits make, because the editing is completely not WYSIWYG. 

  

All I know is, when I click on the command for converting my MS Word + Mathtype document to TeX 

(or LaTeX or whatever - they're all the same to me) 

the MS Word command spits out this ENORMOUS mass of unintelligible code 

that is absolutely worthless and unreadable to me, but is somehow intelligible and desirable 

to the math journal editors.  The conversion takes my 20 or 40 page paper and produces text code 

that runs 500 pages long. 



Again, I need a WYSIWYG editor to edit. That's why WYSIWYG was invented. 


When I published math papers in peer-reviewed journals before, I never had this problem before, 

because those journals did the conversion for me.  But, I fear that the current journal to which I have 

submitted will not be so kind. 


----- Original Message -----




From: "William Adams" <will.adams at frycomm.com> 
To: "TeXhax" <texhax at tug.org> 
Cc: "Elaine R. Firestone (GSFC-616.0)[BIOSPHERICAL INSTRUMENTS INC]" <elaine.r.firestone at nasa.gov>, "cornwall 5" <cornwall_5 at comcast.net> 
Sent: Thursday, December 15, 2011 11:29:48 AM 
Subject: Re: [texhax] MS Word to Mathtype 

On Dec 15, 2011, at 10:54 AM, Firestone, Elaine R. (GSFC-616.0)[BIOSPHERICAL INSTRUMENTS INC] wrote: 

> Boy, this is news to me that Word will convert a .doc file to a .tex file. I've been using TeX (actual TeX, not LaTeX) since 1992 and MS Word for the Mac since around that same time period and I've never seen that capability in Word... Are you sure you aren't just seeing MathType's conversion of the *equations* to TeX code? There's a huge difference in just the equations in TeX and the entire document. 

You are of course correct. 

That said, there are conversion tools, to include: 

 - rtf2latex --- free, opensource 
 - tex2word --- commercial, but there is a demonstration copy 

William 
-- 
William Adams 
senior graphic designer 
Fry Communications 
Sphinx of black quartz, judge my vow. 
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://tug.org/pipermail/texhax/attachments/20111215/57f99f87/attachment-0001.html>