-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...). The program is
copyrighted but free. An enhanced version of this program,
tr2latex, is available in support/tr2latex
The DECUS TeX distribution (see sources of software) also contains a program which converts troff to TeX.
Glenn Geers of the University of Sydney, Australia (glenn@qed.physics.su.oz.au) is translating wp2latex into C and adding some WordPerfect 5.1 features, in particular its equation handling. His work is in the glenn subdirectory of support/wp2latex
pcwritex.arc, from support/pcwritex, 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, Republic of Ireland.
In spite of the directory name, it also contains a shell script to convert BibTeX to refer as well. The collection is not maintained.
Translation to RTF may be done (for a somewhat constrained set of LaTeX documents) by TeX2RTF, which can produce ordinary RTF, Windows Help RTF (as well as HTML, conversion to HTML). TeX2RTF is supported on various Unix platforms and under Windows 3.1; it is available from support/tex2rtf
An FAQ that deals specifically with conversions between TeX-based formats and word processor formats is regularly posted to comp.text.tex, is available via http://www.kfa-juelich.de/isr/1/texconv.html and is archived as help/wp-conv/texcnven.txt
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 Framemaker's own.
The aim here is to emulate the Unix nroff, which formats text as best it can for the screen, from the same input as the Unix typesetting program troff.
Ralph Droms (droms@bucknell.edu) has a style file and a program that provide the LaTeX equivalent of nroff, though it doesn't do a good job with tables and mathematics. The software is available in support/txt; the original dvi2tty often does an acceptable job and is available in dviware/dvi2tty
Another possibility is to use screen.sty (available as macros/latex209/contrib/misc/screen.sty). Use a dvi2tty program of some kind; you might try dviware/crudetype as well. Another possibility is to use the LaTeX-to-ASCII conversion program, l2a (support/l2a), although this is really more of a de-TeXing program.
The canonical de-TeXing program is detex (support/detex), which removes all comments and control sequences from its input before writing it to its output. Its original purpose was to prepare input for a dumb spelling checker.
SGML is a very important system for document storage and interchange, but it has no formatting features; its companion ISO standard DSSSL (http://www.jclark.com/dsssl/) is designed for writing transformations and formatting, but this has not yet been widely implemented. Some SGML authoring systems (e.g., SoftQuad Author/Editor) have formatting abilities, and there are high-end specialist SGML typesetting systems (e.g., Miles33's Genera). However, the majority of SGML users probably transform the source to an existing typesetting system when they want to print. TeX is a good candidate for this. There are three approaches to writing a translator:
If these packages don't meet your needs for an average SGML typesetting job, you need the big commercial stuff.
Since HTML is simply an example of SGML, we do not need a specific system for HTML. However, Nathan Torkington (Nathan.Torkington@vuw.ac.nz) developed html2latex from the HTML parser in NCSA's Xmosaic package. The program takes an HTML file and generates a LaTeX file from it. The conversion code is subject to NCSA restrictions, but the whole source is available as support/html2latex
Jonathan Fine (J.Fine@pmms.cam.ac.uk) hopes to release, during 1996, his macro package that directly interprets and typesets an SGML source file.
Michel Goossens and Janne Saarela published a very useful summary of SGML, and of public domain tools for writing and manipulating it, in TUGboat 16(2).
TeX is a typesetting language, not a markup system. With properly-used LaTeX, you may be luckier, but don't expect a free lunch. Remember that a) if you want a really good Web document, you had better redesign it from scratch, and b) HTML (even HTML3) has pretty poor `typesetting' facilities, and anything beyond the trivial will probably need to end up a graphic.
LaTeX2HTML (support/latex2html) is a package by Nikos Drakos (mostly of perl scripts) that breaks up a LaTeX document into one or more components, and links them together so that they can be read over the World-Wide Web as an hypertext document. It defines a mapping between LaTeX intra-document references and hyperlinks, and extends the mechanisms to permit reference to other (possibly remote) documents and other Internet resources. It translates LaTeX accented and other characters (as best it can) to things that World-Wide Web browsers can display, and translates mathematics (and other things that browsers can't deal with) to images that can be loaded in-line into the hypertext document.
LaTeX2HTML needs Perl, the PBM utilities, dvips, GhostScript, and other sundries; it assumes it is running on a Unix system. Michel Goossens and Janne Saarela published a detailed discussion of LaTeX2HTML, and how to tailor it, in TUGboat 16(2).
There are two alternative strategies:
If you want on-line hypertext with a (La)TeX source, probably on the World Wide Web, consider four technologies (which overlap):
\special
commands); there are supporting macro packages for plain TeX and
LaTeX).
The HyperTeX project aims to extend the functionality of all the
LaTeX cross-referencing commands (including the table of contents)
to produce \special commands which are parsed by DVI processors
conforming to the HyperTeX guidelines;
it provides general hypertext links, including those
to external documents.
The HyperTeX specification says that conformant viewers/translators
must recognize the following set of \special commands:
html:<a href = "href_string">
html:<a name = "name_string">
html:</a>
html:<img src = "href_string">
html:<base href = "href_string">
The href, name and end commands are used to do the basic hypertext operations of establishing links between sections of documents.
Further details are available on http://xxx.lanl.gov/hypertex/; there are two commonly-used implementations of the specification, a modified xdvi and a modified dvips. Output from the latter may be used in a modified GhostScript or Acrobat Distiller.
In the simplest case, use your DVI to PostScript driver, and run the
result through Adobe's Acrobat Distiller; even simpler, if
you use a Mac or Windows TeX system, is to install Acrobat Exchange,
and use PDFwriter like a printer from your application. The latter is
a dead end, though fine for simple documents, since you can't insert
extra hyperlinks in the PDF output. For that, you need the
Distiller route, which supports a special PostScript operator called
pdfmark, for passing through information to the PDF.
To translate all the LaTeX cross-referencing into Acrobat
links, you need a LaTeX package to suitably redefine
the internal commands. There are two of these for LaTeX2e, both
based on the HyperTeX specification
(see Making hypertext documents from TeX):
Sebastian Rahtz's hyperref (available from
macros/latex/contrib/supported/hyperref), and Michael Mehlich's
hyper (available from macros/latex/contrib/supported/hyper). You use
dvihps (a modified dvips)
to translate the DVI into PostScript acceptable to
Distiller. Alternatively, if you know you only want Acrobat,
hyperref also has a `native PDF' mode, which works with
plain dvips (or most other translators) and gives access to
all the functionality of pdfmark.
Sadly, there are no free implementations of Distiller, nor any signs of them. GhostScript (versions 3.51 onwards) can display and print PDF files, however, if you are on a platform with no Acrobat Reader. You may see a DVI to PDF translator soon, but do not hold your breath.