mark@nuri.inria.fr (james mark @) (08/29/90)
A few weeks ago I posted a request for conversion programs that would translate TeX or LaTeX documents to and/or from any other text or desktop publishing format. Here is a summary of the responses I got. All of the following programs are available by anonymous ftp. All of them convert something else to TeX or LaTeX; apart from BibTeX (see below), I received no information at all on conversions going the other way (although prep.ai.mit.edu (128.52.14.14) is rumored to have something called texinfo2troff, for those who are into texinfo). troff ----- TROFF-TO-LATEX.TAR-Z is available on wsmr-simtel20.army.mil (26.2.0.74) in directory pd2:<unix-c.textproc>. This program, written by Kamal Al-Yahya at Stanford, assists in the translation of a troff document into LaTeX format. It recognizes most -ms and -man macros, plus most eqn and some tbl preprocessor commands. Anything fancier than that needs to be done by hand. Two style files are provided. There is also a man page (which converts very well to LaTeX :-). The program is copyrighted but free. scribe ------ wsmr-simtel20.army.mil (26.2.0.74), in directory pd2:<unix-c.textproc>, was reported to have a program called scribe2latex, but I couldn't find it there. I have an old copy (which I have been unable to test) if anyone is interested. It was written by Van Jacobson of Lawrence Berkeley Laboratory. WordPerfect ----------- wp2latex.zip is available on wuarchive.wustl.edu (128.252.135.4) in directory mirrors/msdos/tex and on wsmr-simtel20.army.mil (26.2.0.74) in directory pd1:<msdos.tex>. This is a PC program written in Turbo Pascal by R. C. Houtepen at the Eindhoven University in the Netherlands. It converts WordPerfect 5.0 documents to LaTeX. Pascal source is included. Users find it "helpful" and "decent" in spite of some limitations. It gets high marks for handling font changes. Limitations include no indices, table of contents, margins or graphics. It also won't handle the new features of WordPerfect 5.1, in particular the equation formatter. The program is copyrighted but free. Glenn Geers of the University of Sydney (glenn@extro.ucc.su.oz.au) is translating wp2latex into C and adding some WordPerfect 5.1 features, in particular its equation handling. This is an ongoing project; the current C code is available by anonymous ftp from ymir.claremont.edu (134.173.4.23) in directory [anonymous.tex.ibm_pc.front_ends.wp2latex]. It was also posted to alt.sources on 8 August 1990. PC-Write -------- pcwritex.arc is available on wuarchive.wustl.edu (128.252.135.4) in directory mirrors/msdos/tex and on wsmr-simtel20.army.mil (26.2.0.74) in directory pd1:<msdos.tex>. This is a print driver for PC-Write that "prints" a PC-Write V2.71 document to a TeX-compatible disk file. It was written by Peter Flynn at University College, Cork, Ireland. It is public domain. I've had no comment from users. RUNOFF ------ Peter Vanroose, of the University of Leuven, Belgium, has written a RUNOFF-to-TeX conversion program in VMS Pascal. It is available from comp.text archives (they do exist, don't they? The program was submitted in December 1987) or from the author (peter@dit.lth.se); or, for that matter, from me, since he sent me a copy. REFER/Tib --------- There are a few programs for converting bibliographic data between BibTeX and REFER/Tib formats. They are available for anonymous ftp from wheaties.ai.mit.edu (128.52.32.13) in directory pub/refer-to-bibtex. In spite of the directory name, it also contains a program (or rather a shell script) to convert BibTeX to REFER as well. I have not tested any of these. **************** In addition, a group at Ohio State University is working on a common document format based on SGML. In theory any format could be translated to or from this one. Also, Framemaker supposedly has "import filters" to aid in the translation from alien formats (presumably including TeX) to Framemaker; perhaps other desktop publishing programs have similar things. For those who are considering writing a conversion program, may I suggest Microsoft Word to LaTeX, since this seems to be the most frequently-asked unanswered question on this topic. If anyone has further information, I'm always ready to update the above list. **************** Thanks to the following people who contributed information to this posting: Bill von Hagen (wvh@transarc.com) Darren New <new@ee.udel.edu> Paul Amer (amer@cis.udel.edu) James Darrell McCauley (jdm5548@diamond.tamu.edu) Declan (declan@portia.stanford.edu) Peter Vanroose <peter@dit.lth.se> Greg Roelofs <roelofs@amelia.nas.nasa.gov> Glenn Geers (glenn@extro.ucc.su.oz.au) Disclaimer: All errors and opinions are mine. Mark James <mark@nuri.inria.fr> or <mark@bdblues.altair.fr>