Convert Word to LaTeX

How to use it#

1. Drop a .docx file on the page, or click to choose one. From Google Docs, choose File, Download, Microsoft Word (.docx) first, or copy the text and paste it anywhere on this page.
2. Choose a whole file that compiles as it is, or the body alone to paste into a document of your own.
3. Pick the margins, what a top heading becomes, how code is written, and whether headings are numbered.
4. Copy the LaTeX or download the .tex file, and download the pictures as a .zip to save beside it.

What comes through from Word#

The document is read by its structure, the way Word itself describes it. A paragraph in the Heading 1 style becomes a section, Heading 2 a subsection, and so on, and the Title and Subtitle styles become headings above them. Bold, italic, and strikethrough carry over, and so do bulleted and numbered lists, links, and tables, whose first row becomes the header row.

How the document looks does not. LaTeX lays out the page itself from the document class, so fonts, sizes, colours, spacing, and margins have nowhere to go. A heading made by making ordinary text big and bold, rather than with a heading style, is not a heading: use the heading styles for anything that should be a section.

Footnotes and endnotes become \footnote, each placed where the text refers to it, with its own emphasis and links kept. LaTeX numbers them itself, so a document that restarts its numbering in each section numbers them straight through instead.

Pictures#

Every picture in the document is taken out as its own file, named picture-1.png, picture-2.jpg, and so on, in the order they appear, and the LaTeX refers to each by that name. Download .zip saves them all at once; put them in the same folder as the .tex file, and \includegraphics finds them.

pdfLaTeX includes PNG, JPG, and PDF pictures. A drawing Word stored as EMF or WMF, as charts and diagrams often are, has to be saved as a PNG first, and the notes say which ones. A picture pasted in from Google Docs stays a web address, which LaTeX cannot fetch, so for pictures download the .docx instead of copying.

Equations#

Equations made with Word's equation editor are stored as a structure of their own rather than as text, and they do not come through. The notes count how many were left out, so you can type each one into the LaTeX between dollar signs, which is usually quicker than it sounds for short formulas. An equation typed as ordinary text, such as "E = mc2", comes through as that text.