Re: OT: Choice of OOo and LaTeX (Was: Tool for document management)
* Peter Robinson <peter.robinson@t-online.de> [070926 00:35]:
> If you write in latex you can always convert to RTF via latex2rtf, which in
> my experience works excellently. If needed, it is no big deal to convert
> this to word format. It is definitely worth the effort to learn latex.
This afternoon, out of curiosity, I installed latex2rtf and ran it on
a typical document of the variety which I routinely produce. The
document has a header, a footer, page numbers, two columns, and
footnotes. The resulting RTF document was crude to the point of being
laughable, and was unusable.
I then spent an hour or so with Google, searching for alternative
approaches. The most promising seems to be first to convert from
LaTeX to HTML, and then to convert from HTML to M$ Word .doc format.
In previous experimentation, I determined that, for the type of
documents I create, HeVeA is by far the best solution for converting
from LaTeX to HTML. The header detail cannot be reproduced in HTML,
and the output is in a single column, but these losses are
insignificant for my application. HeVeA is marvelous in its handling
of footnotes and the table of contents. And HeVeA has been carefully
designed for compatibility with LaTeX, so there is no need to maintain
parallel versions (LaTeX and HTML) of my source documents.
So now the problem becomes how to convert the HTML produced by HeVeA
into RTF or another format which M$ Word can read -- preferably within
the Debian environment, and preferably with open-source software.
In another hour searching with Google, I came across only one potential
solution.
RLH
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