Question

I need to find a way to quickly convert a latex document into a Microsoft Word 2003 document.

I’m using Kile to edit latex documents on Ubuntu at present.

I can do it the following way:

latex filename.tex
tex4ht filename.tex
mk4ht oolatex filename.tex

then I have to open the resulting filename.odt document in OpenOffice and save as a Word Document.

Is there anyway I do this in a single step?

I can write a program to run the initial three lines, I’m more interested in the conversion from odt to doc without using openoffice.

It would be even better if I could find a way to convert straight from filename.tex to filename.doc

Answer 1

All programs that allegedly convert a document from LaTeX to some word-processing format will lose some information that was there in the original, but apparently you’re willing to live with that.

Here’s one trick that may or may not be suitable for your purposes: if latex2rtf does a good enough conversion (I have no idea how it compares to the converter you are using), just rename its output from whatever.rtf to whatever.doc, and Word will open it just fine. Now if the recipient of the document wants to edit it, she may notice that it is actually not in the usual Word format, but, hey, Word behaves strangely all the time anyway.

Another trick is to convert the output of TeX into images of pages and embed them in a Word document one by one – this preserves the exact layout from TeX and will obviously be useless for anything other than printing (and the print quality will likely be worse than you get by just printing the original), but technically it is a Word document.