Working in academia publishing CS/math, you sooner or later find yourself trying to publish in a journal that will only accept .doc/.rtf. This means tedious, boring hours of translating line after line, especially equations, from LaTeX to an inferior format. Over the years I have tried a number of export tools for LaTeX, but none, at least of the free ones, that I have been very satisfied with. I'd like this page to collect and monitor the best import/export tools for LaTeX, to .doc/.rtf, or to other useful (e.g. HTML, MATHML) formats.
Thus, what is your one favorite import or export LaTeX tool?
AFAIK there isn't really a convenient and effective way to achieve what you're trying to do. What I usually do in those rare occasions is that I export to pdf, then select all the text, and paste into word. It's horrible and messes things up and of course doesn't adjust your citations.
To this day I don't understand how people writing in scientific fields can write and publish in Word. It is common in some human-computer interaction literature but I have not seen it in other conferences and journals. May I ask which one it is?
Also, some places, once you've already been accepted, will be willing to accept a PDF if you push it with them. You may have to make little adjustment yourself. Negotiations sometimes work on this.
The UK TeX FAQ has been collecting answers on this for quite some time now. :)
See Conversion from (La)TeX to HTML and Other conversions to and from (La)TeX. There is another FAQ specifically about Converters between LaTeX and PC Textprocessors maintained by Wilfried Hennings.
For LaTeX to HTML there are LaTeX2HTML, TtH, Tex4ht, TeXpider and Hevea; in my experience TeX4ht is the best. For LaTeX to Word, you can go through RTF with TeX2RTF (not so good), or through Adobe Acrobat which can produce PDF that Word can read (not good either), or go through HTML as above, but best is to use tex4ht which can generate OpenOffice ODT format, from which conversion to Word is easy.
The UK TeX FAQ also has many other useful things; you should take a look.
Related
My question is, which Latex features aren't supported by Mathjax? For example, in Latex I can write $\today$ and it will return the current date. This is not possible in Mathjax.
In KaTeX, a Mathjax alternative, there seem to be more troublesome limitations such as \overrightarrow{AB} not working. I was wondering, what the current limitations of Mathjax are, in terms of latex rendering, before using it in a website instead of converting tex equations to png images and inserting those. I have noticed that Wikipedia uses the tex2png approach instead of Mathjax and was wondering whether they just did not want to depend on Mathjax, whether it's not fully supported by all browsers, whether it's too slow, whether the limited feature set of Mathjax is a problem or just legacy?
First and foremost, Mathjax, as its name suggest, supports mathematics typesetting for the web and is not a web-implementation of general-purpose Latex. Here's what this means most notably feature-wise:
No tables
No tikzpictures
No bibliographies
No support for units, e.g. \SI{10}{\hertz} is not possible (requiring the siunitx package in latex)
No special packages, for example no \uwave from package ulem
Within the math-world, Mathjax is covering almost everything. Here is a list of features that are not supported for mathematics typesetting:
Items that require the mathtools package, for example H \xrightharpoondown[under]{over} I\\.
The other question was, why Wikipedia isn't using Mathjax, but has chosen to convert Equations into a png. I think it's because they already had a working solution when Mathjax got popular and don't really have an incentive to switch to Mathjax. Mathjax especially shines, when you need an out of the box solution for rendering math on the web.
Looking through docs on the TeX website, it seems like almost all documentation for TeX and LaTeX are tutorials on how to use them, how to install fonts, how to get graphics working, etc.
What should I look at if I want to know more about how TeX works? For instance, I want to know about its parser grammar. I want to know how its text engine works, how it decides hyphenation, how it flows text, how it decides on box layouts.
It seems like TeX and LaTeX are built up on several layers of different technologies. (Metafont, etc.) Is there any resources that describe step by step the TeX system from the ground up? How it goes from parsing a text file, into how this is represented and transformed, and finally how it ends up in a particular page layout?
There are essentially two resources on TeX itself: one is the TeXbook by Don Knuth, along with the typeset documented sourcecode itself (Vol's A and C of Computers and Typesetting), the other one is Victor Eijkhout's TeX by Topic, which is available for download.
http://www.cs.umass.edu/~mccallum/papers/acm-queue-ie.pdf
I want to write a document that has the style like this one.
Like having a light colored background on a page, having a big header (like the EXTRACTION) shown in this link. Do you think it is possible to something like this in Latex?
I am comfortable with doing normal things in latex.
If you download and look at the document properties, it was made with InDesign CS3. Could you do this in LaTeX? Yes. The cover page is... just a cover page. If you use fancyhdr and make a page header, you can increase the header height, then lay the page header in there as an image. Try eso-pic for page backgrounds. But in all honesty, that document is kind of ugly. :D
Your best bet for a document like this is to use a desktop publishing system. A Free/Open Source Software solution would be Scribus Desktop Publishing.
Off the top of my head:
-- check out ConTeXt, strictly speaking an alternative to LaTeX but one designed for something closer to DTP than LaTeX itself;
-- LaTeX has lots of facilities for DTP-like work, a good place to start would be the newsletter on link text
-- investigate packages such as PGF/TKZ, eso-pic, newspaper.
That document smell like made with InDesign or QuarkXPress ... I guess there is a way to do it in latex but will not be straightforward at all ...
Actually it's quite feasible using LaTeX, it's just a pity that the learning curve and the technical involvement are higher than when using DTP tools like Adobe InDesign.
This explains why few people are willing to involve the required amount of time and energy into mastering LaTeX for such kind of projects, and consequently why few introductory material is available on the subject.
One notable exception is the recent workshop given by Dominik Wagenführ at Ubucon 2009 in Göttingen. Its proceedings are freely available a the bottom of the page, as well as the related source code. It's all in German but fairly easy to understand and very educational, so I'd recommand you to study it.
I want to use LaTex to write equations faster and if it is possible to export the result as a png or jpg so that it can be used on a website.
Wikipedia (and its opensource wiki engine) uses LaTeX for that, maybe there are some resources available (at least in the code, as it is opensource).
Your question is very broad. You could start with Amazon's List of Latex Books.
You might want to investigate the StackExchange site mathoverflow.net solution - you can read about here. It uses jsMath which supports a lot of LaTeX syntax.
Assuming you already know a little LateX and your primary goal is to get images, a good high-level tool is mathTeX; there are even public servers that will convert to images for you.
If you want to do everything yourself, all the tools use dvipng at bottom.
I like both MathBin.net and Roger's Online Equation Editor. The latter lets you control the quality of the output. See also this question.
try this: http://hausheer.osola.com/latex2png
Here is a small symbol reference for LaTeX. If you are looking for something more as a general introduction, you can look at "The Not So Short Introduction To LaTeX2e". If you use Inkscape, there is built in support for rendering LaTeX and there are also extensions that do the same. You can read some commentary about it here. There are also things like LaTeX to HTML converters; However, at the time I was looking at them, they were somewhat limited in what formulas they could display.
I taught myself LaTeX using the wikibook. It's fairly comprehensive as an initial guide. I've since bought The LaTeX Companion, which is a more advanced guide to in depth typesetting in LaTeX
I use http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/LaTeX/AoPS_L_TeXer.php when I need a quick equation for a web site.
There are packages that will automatically produce images from LaTeX source, but these are often either buggy or used incorrectly. Many people install them on their blogs, for example, and the images show up if you visit the blog directly but they don't show up if you view the page via a blog reader. I'm not saying these problems can't be fixed. They can, but it often takes a few tries.
I prefer just to make a gif and stick it in the page. It's low tech and reliable.
One more tip: it's a good idea to put the LaTeX source in the alt tag of the image. This helps people using screen readers. It helps you too if you need to modify the equation later.
Detextify is a great site that lets you draw a symbol, and it will pop up a list of latex commands that may match your drawing. It's quite accurate! http://detexify.kirelabs.org/classify.html
I'm looking for an internal representation format for text, which would support basic formatting (font face, size, weight, indentation, basic tables, also supporting the following features:
Bidirectional input (Hebrew, Arabic, etc.)
Multi-language input (i.e. UTF-8) in same text field
Anchored footnotes (i.e. a superscript number that's a link to that numbered footnote)
I guess TEI or DocBook are rich enough, but here's the snag -- I want these text buffers to be Web-editable, so I need either an edit control that eats TEI or DocBook, or reliable and two-way conversion between one of them and whatever the edit control can eat.
UPDATE: The edit control I'm thinking of is something like TinyMCE, but AFAICT, TinyMCE lacks footnotes, and I'm not sure about its scalability (how about editing 1 or 2 megabytes of text?)
Any pointers much appreciated!
FCKeditor has a great API, supports several programming languages (considering it is javascript this isn't hard to achieve), can be loaded through HTML or instantiated in code; but most of all, allows easy access to the underlying form field, so having a jQuery or prototype ajax buffer shouldn't be terribly difficult to achieve.
The load time is very quick compared to previous versions. I'd give it a whirl.
In my experience a two-way conversion between HTML and XML formats like TEI or DocBook is very hard to make 100% reliable.
You could use Xopus (demo) to have your users directly edit TEI or DocBook XML. Xopus is a commercial browser based XML editor designed specifically for non-technical users. It supports bidi and UTF-8. The WYSIWYG view is rendered using XSLT, so that gives you sufficient control to render footnotes the way you describe.
As TEI and DocBook don't have means to store styling information, those formats will not allow your users to change font face, size and weight. But I think that is a good thing: users should insert headers and emphasis, designers should pick font face and size.
Xopus has a powerful table editor and indentation is handled by nesting sections or lists and XSLT reacting to that.
Unfortunately Xopus 3 will only scale to about 200KB of XML, but we're working on that.
I can't really decide on one of them. IMHO they are all not very good and complete. They all have their advantages and clear disadvantages. If TinyMCE is your favorite then afaik, it also does tables.
This list will probably come in handy: WysiwygEditorComparision.
I've also used FCKEditor and it performed well and was easy to integrate into my project. It's worth checking out.
Small correction to laurens' answer above: As of now (May 2012), Xopus supports UTF8, but not BiDi editing. Right-to-left text is displayed fine if it came from another source, cannot be edited correctly.
Source: I was recently asked to evaluate this, so have been testing it.