Convert LaTeX to Word

A big problem with writing in LaTeX is collaborating with colleagues who don’t use it. One option is to generate a Word .docx version and use the comments and track changes features in Word / LibreOffice. This does require manually copying the changes back to LaTeX so isn’t quite as nice as using latexdiff (see earlier post) but is slightly easier than adding comments to a PDF.

The best program I’ve found for converting LaTeX to Word is the open source (GPL) command line tool, pandoc (http://pandoc.org/).

Basic usage is quite straightforward:

pandoc latex_document.tex -o latex_document_word_version.docx

The conversion isn’t perfect, figures and tables can get a bit mangled, but it does a good job with the text.

Pandoc can convert between many different formats, including from markdown and reStructuredText (commonly used for software documentation) so it is worth having installed.

Tracking changes in a LaTeX document

One of the problems people often have with using LaTeX for collaborative writing is that it is difficult to track changes in a document, like in Word.

As .tex files are text documents version control such as Git or Mercurial can be used to keep track of changes in the LaTeX source. However, looking at differences in .tex files is not as easy as having a formatted copy of the document with the changes marked, in particular for people not used to LaTeX.

The latexdiff command can be used to create a LaTeX document with the changes marked, from which a PDF can be created showing where the text has changed. For example:

Basic usage is:

latexdiff origionaldoc.tex changeddoc.tex > changes.tex

By default the command will print everything to the terminal so the output needs to be redirected (using >) to a file.

When writing papers we commonly have a shell script to generate a change tex file, create a PDF and remove temp files.

# Create diff file
latexdiff --exclude-textcmd "section,subsection,sub subsection" \
   201403_GOBIA_RSGISLib_RIOS_origional.tex \
   201403_GOBIA_RSGISLib_RIOS.tex > \
   201403_GOBIA_RSGISLib_RIOS_changes_temp.tex

# Create PDF
pdflatex 201403_GOBIA_RSGISLib_RIOS_changes_temp.tex
bibtex 201403_GOBIA_RSGISLib_RIOS_changes_temp
pdflatex 201403_GOBIA_RSGISLib_RIOS_changes_temp.tex
pdflatex 201403_GOBIA_RSGISLib_RIOS_changes_temp.tex

# Rename PDF and move extra files.
mv 201403_GOBIA_RSGISLib_RIOS_changes_temp.pdf 201403_GOBIA_RSGISLib_RIOS_changes.pdf
rm 201403_GOBIA_RSGISLib_RIOS_changes_temp.*

Note sometimes changes for particular tex commands can cause problems when creating a PDF, producing an error along these lines:

! Argument of \UL@word has an extra }.
    <inserted text>
                \par 
l.292 ...\DIFaddbegin \DIFadd{Methods}\DIFaddend }
                                                  \label{sec:method}

To stop this happening you can exclude particular commands (e.g., section) using the ‘–exclude-textcmd’ flag. (Thanks to this post on stack exchange for the tip).