Up to Converters from LaTeX to PC Textprocessors - Overview
last update: Sep. 1, 1999
latex2rtf, written in C.
In 1994 the first Version of LaTeX2rtf was written by a group of students of the Viena University supervised by Ralf Schlatterbeck. They took up a LaTeX parser and added most of the functionality to the program. In 1995 work continued with a second group of students. The result was LaTeX2rtf Version 1.5.
Unfortunately, two different teams started further development of that program, not knowing of each other:
My dream is that in some future we can synchronize both developments, but up to now they are different.
So this page is about Georg's version.
Temporarily I (Wilfried Hennings) feel responsible for coordinating the exchange of development information and I maintain a mailing list latex2rtf@fz-juelich.de for that. But we are still seeking for a person who can act as coordinator of future development. Anyone feeling able to do that or wanting to subscribe to the mailing list please contact me by email to W.Hennings@fz-juelich.de.
Version 1.8 is now released, with a couple of bug-fixes and some enhancements for several document-classes/styles.
Note for non-unix users
Because LaTeX heavily relies on "lines" (e.g. empty line=>
new paragraph), latex2rtf needs to detect end-of-line codes at many places in
the code. Coming from unix, latex2rtf assumes the end-of-line-code to be
"lf" (hex0A=dec10, c-code "/n"). However, in macintosh
end-of-line is coded by "cr" (hex0D=dec13, c-code "/r"), in
dos/windows by "crlf" (0D0A, "/r/n").
Because end-of-line detection is needed at so many places in the code, we
thought it would be a good idea to first read the latex source, change all dos
and mac type end-of-line codes to unix style, write this to disk on a temp file
and only use this temp file for conversion. We however forgot that there may be
\input{} files which will not be changed to unix end-of-line style by this
attempt.
So be warned that LaTeX documents saved from dos or mac can only be converted
correctly if they consist of one single input file (without any \input{}). If
there are \input{}-ed parts, convert them to unix style before starting
latex2rtf.
The next release should be able to process non-unix-style end-of-line-codes
also in \input{}-ed files.
Afterwards there shall be a jump to Version 2.0 with a complete redesign, but this is not history but future ...
Nevertheless there are drawbacks in the conversion. In fact, don't expect any LaTeX-file to be converted like you want, don't expect it to be converted without errors or warnings, and: don't even expect it to be converted at all, since LaTeX2rtf is at most at a very experimental stage. LaTeX2rtf is known to have a lot of bugs. And they grow more and more each day. In fact we could state that there are some special cases, where a LaTeX-file can be translated to RTF satisfactorily by LaTeX2rtf.
- This was sort of disclaimer, ok? Ok!
This program is free software; you can redistribute it and/or modify it
under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free
Software Foundation; either version 2 of the License, or (at your option) any
later version.
This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY
WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANT-ABILITY or FITNESS FOR
A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License
for more details.
Note that this Copyright note only applies to the changes made to get the actual version. The older versions have their own Copyright policy stated in their distribution.
C-source and makefiles of the latest version as well as executables for
msdos and win32 (win95/win98/nt4.0) are available from
CTAN sites, directory
.../support/latex2rtf
(the ... stands for a host specific base directory, which often is either
"/pub/tex" or "/tex-archive").
This HTML page is part of the texcnv site.
Copyright © 1998, 1999, 2000 Wilfried Hennings
You may copy and redistribute it under the following conditions: