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Similar questions have been asked before, such as Word 2003 to LaTeX converter and How to write in .doc/.odf/.rtf and convert to .tex?. I have a minor specification on them:

I would like the highlights from word/rtf to be preserved. So far I've seen that rtf2latex2e does not do this, writer2latex14 allows it via OpenOffice format, but this seems to create a lot of problems in my documents due to multiple non-latin alphabet special characters in use (e.g. greek, cyrillic, icelandic). The workaround via AbiWord made the document also unreadable, and again difficult to compile with fidelity.

Are there any other options that could possibly do this, that I could try? Ideally I would like to keep as few features as possible (bold, italic, underline, h1, h2, h3, highlight, maybe hyperlink) so as to keep the latex files humanly readable. Perhaps there are some converters which allow you to select exactly the features that you'd need preserved? Thanks!

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puslet88
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  • Plus, 'highlighting' is not a neat concept for LaTeX. Nothing in the standard classes will do this. So you need a package and some work one way, some another; some are compatible with one engine, some another; and so on. [Really, highlighting is something I think of for markup on documents where the format is finalised e.g. somebody else compiled it. Not as something you would plan as part of a document when creating it.] So you would need to decide what you wanted the converter to map the highlighting to.... – cfr Feb 17 '15 at 23:50
  • You aren't writing documents in Word with the intention of converting them to .tex are you? That way lies madness. Conversion is something you do (1) for documents you created before you learnt LaTeX; (2) for documents other people created which you cannot bear to work with in their original format. And then you edit manually to make it actually usable. – cfr Feb 17 '15 at 23:55
  • Note that similar comments apply to underlining as to highlighting, although underlining isn't quite so fraught. But only marginally. I notice that you do not mention: citations, cross-references, unordered and ordered lists, quotations, headers, footers, title/author/date among the things you wish to keep. So do your documents just not feature any of these things? – cfr Feb 17 '15 at 23:57
  • @cfr Thanks for your feedback. My situation is that I have a bunch of files that have been made in Word environment, which are essentially readings that are annotated with visual features like highlight and annotate. LaTeX would allow a much better way to do this, so I'm looking into using a workflow like this to manipulate a bit of which LaTeX encodings I am able to see. I am precisely looking for more semantic markup. It would be great if I could migrate and start updating the documents I have too. – puslet88 Feb 18 '15 at 09:47
  • On the other features, these documents may sometimes include some other formatting features, but importing then will not really be important, as adding them may take a few lines of templates or title/author texts. The features I mentioned make up the basic necessity. Any ideas? Thanks. – puslet88 Feb 18 '15 at 09:48
  • I don't know if you can do this in Word for highlighting but you can search and replace formatting in some cases e.g. replace italics with \emph{} or whatever. Not very convenient if you have a lot of documents to convert, but maybe useful as a last resort. – cfr Feb 18 '15 at 12:11
  • Thanks @cfr, it's an idea actually. Word does allow you to look for highlighted text, I'm not sure how strong it is with replacing the whole highlighted mark with this, but I'll have a look some time soon. It may be difficult to separate them from the highlighted text function though. – puslet88 Feb 18 '15 at 13:44

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