Other conversions to and from (La)TeX

This page lists converters to and from LaTeX, as of May 6, 2021

This list is not complete. Some older converters, which are still available on the internet but have rather limited capabilities, e.g. only support the older word .doc format, are not listed.
The list also contains no recommendations.

To LaTeX from:

• troff: Tr2latex, assists in the translation of a troff document into LaTeX 2.09 format. It recognises most -ms and -man macros, plus most eqn and some tbl preprocessor commands. Anything fancier needs to be done by hand. Two style files are provided. There is also a man page (which converts very well to LaTeX…). Tr2latex is an enhanced version of the earlier troff-to-latex (which is no longer available).

• WordPerfect: wp2latex is actively maintained, and is available either for Windows or for Unix systems.
  http://www.penguin.cz/%7Efojtik/wp2latex/wp2latex.htm
  Open source, GPLv2. Latest version: 3.96 (2021-04-27)

• RTF: rtf2latex2e, by Ujwal Sathyam and Scott Prahl.
  https://sourceforge.net/projects/rtf2latex2e/
  Open source, GPL. Latest version: 2.2.3 (2016-09-17)
  It will only convert rtf as saved from Word 2010 and earlier. Rtf saved from the newer versions of Word contains tags which cause rtf2latex2e to segfault. Development of it seems to have stalled.

• OpenOffice: Writer2LaTeX http://writer2latex.sourceforge.net
  requires: OpenOffice or LibreOffice, and Java.
  Open source, LGPL. Latest versions: stable 1.6.1 (2018-10-19), snapshot 1.9.3 alpha (2018-10-19)

• Word doc / docx:

  • docx2tex https://github.com/transpect/docx2tex/
    Open source BSD 2-Clause “Simplified” License. Latest version: 1.6 - 2021-01-25
    requires: Java 1.7 up to 1.14

  • wordtolatex http://www.wordtolatex.com/ (commercial)

  • word2latex https://www.word2latex.net/ (commercial)

  • Word-to-Latex https://www.grindeq.com (commercial)

  • docx2latex https://www.docx2latex.com/ (commercial)

  • word2tex https://www.chikrii.com/products/word2tex/ (commercial)

• Excel Excel2Latex converts an Excel file into a LaTeX tabular environment; it comes as a xla file which defines some Excel macros to produce output in a new format. https://github.com/krlmlr/Excel2LaTeX
  LaTeX Project Public License, version 1.3 or later. Latest version: 3.5.0 (2017-07-15)
  Also online conversion: http://excel2latex.com/

• runoff: Peter Vanroose’s rnototex conversion program is written in VMS Pascal. The sources are distributed with a VAX executable.

• refer/tib: There are a few programs for converting bibliographic data between BibTeX and refer/tib formats. The collection includes a shell script converter from BibTeX to refer format as well. The collection is not maintained.

From LaTeX to:

• Convert LaTeX to OpenOffice format, using the tex4ht command oolatex; open the result in OpenOffice or LibreOfficeand “save as” a MS-Word document. (Note that OpenOffice and LibreOffice themselves are not on CTAN; see http://www.openoffice.org/ or https://www.libreoffice.org/, though most linux systems offer it as a ready-to-install bundle.)

• Convert LaTeX to Word format:

  • tex2word https://hunyadi.info.hu/levente/en/tex2word
    Open source, GPL. Latest version: 2016-03-22 (development stalled)

  • LaTeXML https://dlmf.nist.gov/LaTeXML/
    Open source, Creative Commons 0: “No Rights Reserved” (GPL compatible). Latest version: 0.8.5 (2020-11-17)

  • tex2word https://www.chikrii.com/products/tex2word/ (commercial)

  • LaTeX-to-Word https://www.grindeq.com (commercial)

  • Convert LaTeX via PDF: Acrobat Reader (version 5.0 and later) or PDF Exchange Editor will output rather feeble files that Word can read.

• Convert LaTeX to rtf:

  • latex2rtf http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/
    Open source, GPL. Latest version: 2.3.18 (2020-06-23)
    converts only a limited subset of LaTeX markup; development stalled

Converters supporting multiple formats

• pandoc https://pandoc.org/
  Open source, GPL. Latest version: 2.13 (2021-03-21)
  Pandoc can convert between numerous markup and word processing formats, including, but not limited to, various flavors of Markdown, HTML, LaTeX and Word docx. Pandoc can also produce PDF output.
  Pandoc’s enhanced version of Markdown includes syntax for tables, definition lists, metadata blocks, footnotes, citations, math (only the new Office Math, not equation editor/MathType), and much more - but no pictures.

• A group at Ohio State University (USA) is working on a common document format based on SGML, with the ambition that any format could be translated to or from this one.

• FrameMaker provides “import filters” to aid translation from alien formats (presumably including TeX) to FrameMakers own. ALso see http://webhome.cs.uvic.ca/~nigelh/fm2latex.html (latest update 2015) and http://www.cs.stir.ac.uk/~kjt/software/framemaker/#la_mml (latest update 2019)

FAQ ID: Q-fmtconv