Pat Scott wrote:
Hello,
Does anyone out there use LaTeX? My husband need some advice. He
is a newbie with a Macintosh - has had his 15" G4 Powerbook, OS 10.4.2,
for only 6 months. He is writing a technical textbook, composing it in
LaTeX as he goes along. He needs to be able to import images and
mathematical formulas from Word documents. He knows there is
Word-to-TeX software for pcs, but is there any for the Mac?
Your best option for images might be to try to extract them from the
Word doc where possible. I don't know if Word for Mac has anything as
useful as the ability to simply drag an image from a Word doc to the
desktop to extract it (I don't think the win32 versions do - they're
what I use when I must use Word).
You might be able to copy and paste images from a Word doc into an image
program, then save the image. Alternately, I usually use OpenOffice to
open the Word doc, then "save as HTML" - a horrific hack, but one that
gets the original images out, usually without recompressing them and
thus losing quality.
Formulae are more difficult. I'd probably want to try to get the formula
as an EPS that I could reference in the LaTeX document. If you're really
lucky, the formula editor can save an EPS file or some format that can
be converted to an EPS. Failing that, you might be able to print to PDF
and either use the PDF directly, or crop it down and save it as an EPS
in Acrobat Professional.
I don't have access to Word right now, and I have no access to Word for
Mac at any time, so I can't do any more. Hopefully those are a few ideas
that might at least prove worth investigating.
--
Craig Ringer
