compile a .tex file to Word document?

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Workflow for converting LaTeX into Open Office / MS Word Format

Are there any solutions to this? I know that's probably not the most favorable thing to do... But I really want to be able to give the document to someone, and they would need it in Microsoft word.

There is something called latex2rtf (that's the closest thing I could find), but it segfaults and is very unstable. It does not produce well-formed files for my document or even subsets of my document.

Any help appreciate.

Maybe a combination of tex4ht to ODT (via the oolatex option), then back to M$ Word after a quick jump to OpenOffice or Google docs? — chl, Feb 07 '11 at 22:28
Best way to do it (which is still lousy): Compile the LaTeX document into a PDF and convert the PDF to a Word file using one of the many PDF2DOC tools. — Martin Scharrer, Feb 07 '11 at 22:33
it seems like there are tons of PDF to Word converters, something I did not expect. Maybe that's the path to go. — kloop, Feb 07 '11 at 22:34
I wrote a blog post "Converting documents from LaTeX to other formats". Maybe something helpful in there? — frabjous, Feb 08 '11 at 00:01

score 8 · Accepted Answer · answered Feb 07 '11 at 23:06

You have several options, none of them ideal:

Probably the best conversion you can get is TeX2Word software by Chikrii Softlab. It is a commercial software, I think it has a free trial period with limited functionality. Also, I think you need to have Windows and Word, as it is some sort of Word plugin. For that reason, I have never used it, but from the samples that they have on their website it seems quite powerful.
You can use htlatex or plastex to convert the tex file either to html or OpenDocument. You can load html directly into Word, and you can use OpenOffice to convert OpenDocument to a Word format.
If you have LyX installed, it will do the conversion to html or Opendocument for you, so you don't have to figure out what command line option to use to get the correct format. Just import the document into LyX, and export it in the format you need.
I think OpenOffice may be able to import a simple TeX document, although I do not have OpenOffice installed so I cannot check.

I've been fairly successful with htlatex->html->word->doc as long as it's a simple document. — Habi, Feb 08 '11 at 10:01

compile a .tex file to Word document?

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