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My term paper has fairly strict formatting guidelines - double-spaced & 12pt font. I am currently on page 7 (when previewed in LaTeX). However, when I copy and paste into MS Word, I've hit the 10-page limit already.

Any hints on how to get these two numbers to agree? I want to use LaTeX for BibTex integration, but I don't want to hand in a 7 page paper with the proviso that "it's 10 pages in Word, I swear" or have a paper that's actually far in excess of the page cap when viewed in Word.

Here's the relevant bits of my LaTeX document:

\documentclass[12pt]{article}
  \usepackage[tmargin=1in,bmargin=1in,lmargin=1.25in,rmargin=1.25in]{geometry}

\usepackage{setspace}
  \doublespacing
Guido
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Zak
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    What do you mean by "copy and paste into Word"? Computer Modern is quite large at 12pt. Try \usepackage{mathptmx} to get Times. This should help. Do you have to submit a Word document or can you submit a PDF? – Alan Munn Nov 15 '12 at 23:31
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  • @AlanMunn: I export the LaTeX into PDF, then copy-paste that into Word and clean up stuff like page numbers.

    Times makes my LaTeX product shorter, taking it farther away from the page number in Word.

     – Zak Nov 15 '12 at 23:37
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    I see. Is that because you must submit a Word document? TeX does a much better job of spacing words than Word does, which I think accounts for the discrepancy. If you can submit the PDF, I wouldn't worry about it as long as the font size and margins are what was requested. – Alan Munn Nov 15 '12 at 23:40
  • @AlanMunn We aren't required to submit Word, but I'm sure the prof came up with the page limit thinking about Word. At this rate, the 10-page LaTeX paper will be over 14 pages (if it was in Word), which seems like a pretty significant difference in amount of content (vs classmates). – Zak Nov 15 '12 at 23:44
  • when you paste it into word do you justify the text so that adds glue between the words? – cmhughes Nov 16 '12 at 00:17
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    I think you're overthinking this. If you give your Prof a ten page paper with appropriate margins and font size he or she won't count the words. – Alan Munn Nov 16 '12 at 00:36
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    You may want to try pandoc for converting documents from latex to docx. – mythealias Nov 16 '12 at 02:00
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    Why bother? If you are really that concerned about the number of pages rather than actual content, please use something like setspace (http://www.ctan.org/pkg/setspace), and control the number of pages to your heart's content. – Masroor Nov 16 '12 at 02:52

1 Answers1

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For me in your question it is not clear, whether you have to submit a word file or a pdf file to your professor. Must it be in Word or could it be a LaTeX pdf.

Nevertheless, I think the following could be very helpful for you:

On CTAN you can find the package wordlike to prepare a word like looking document with LaTeX.

If it is only important how many words are building your work, you can write your document in LaTeX and add the number of words used in your document. In the Question Is there any way to do a correct word count of a LaTeX document? you can learn how to do it.

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