This file documents LaTeX2RTF , a converter from the LaTeX markup language for document typesetting into rtf, which does the same thing, but in another way and mood.
In 1994 the first Version of LaTeX2RTF was written by Fernando Dorner and Andreas Granzer of the Viena University supervised by Ralf Schlatterbeck in a one-semester course. They created a simple LaTeX parser and added most of the infrastructure for the program. This was version 1.0 of LaTeX2RTF . In 1995, work on LaTeX2RTF was continued in another one-semester course by Friedrich Polzer and Gerhard Trisko. The result was LaTeX2RTF version 1.5. Ralf Schlatterbeck maintained and extended LaTeX2RTF until 1998.
In 1998 Georg Lehner found the reference to LaTeX2RTF on the TeX Conversion Webpage of Wilfried Hennings and added some functionality and took over the maintainence of the program. The last version release by Georg is 1.8aa. Wilfried Hennings now coordinates the development of the program and maintains the project on SourceForge where there are also (low volume) mailing lists for users latex2rtf-users@lists.sourceforge.net and developers latex2rtf-developers@lists.sourceforge.net. For subscription to these lists: mail_to_latex2rtf-users-request@lists.sourceforge.net?subject=subscribe or mail_to_latex2rtf-developers-request@lists.sourceforge.net?subject=subscribe
As of December 2001, version 1.9.12 of LaTeX2RTF is available. One day there shall be a jump to Version 2.0, but this is not history but future ...
The contents of this manual were composed by copying shamelessly what was available in the original sources and documentation.
LaTeX2RTF is a translator program from LaTeX text into "rich text format" files. These files are commonly referred to as RTF files. RTF is a published standard format by Microsoft. This standard is somewhat ambiguous in places and Microsoft ignores various parts of the standard that are inconvenient, but RTF is widely used by many WYSIWIG text editors and is supported by Microsoft Word and Word for Windows. RTF can be exported and/or imported by several textprocessors.
LaTeX2RTF translates the text and much of the formatting information from LaTeX to RTF, but the typeset output is not nearly as good as what you would get from using LaTeX
directly. So, why bother translating? There are three purposes:
.doc file of 32,845 byte. So you edit your
documents either with edit.com or edlin in the structured form that LaTeX
encourages, and then you use MS-..., or MS-...-Viewer or any other RTF-rendering software to print out your file. Yes, this somewhat bizarre, but we are all somewhat bizarre, are we not?
There are drawbacks to the conversion process. In fact, don't expect any LaTeX file to be converted as you would like, don't expect it to be converted without errors or warnings, and don't be especially surprised when it doesn't convert at all. LaTeX2RTF is known to have many bugs and many missing features. Paradoxically, this number seems to grow more and more with each day. However, we can categorically state that there are some special cases, in which a LaTeX file will be translated to RTF satisfactorily by LaTeX2RTF -- This was sort of disclaimer, ok? OK!
LaTeX is a system for typesetting text and therefore it focuses on the logical structure of a document, whilst RTF is meant to be a transport format for a family of Desktop Publishing Software, dealing mostly with the design of a text.
Although the possible different commands and styles in LaTeX are much more flexible and standardized than in RTF, only a small subset of commands has been implemented to date. See Unimplemented Features.
Some of the capabilities of LaTeX2RTF are restricted in scope or buggy. See Known Bugs.
RTF is a moving target, because Microsoft does not stop inventing new extensions and features for it. So you cannot view newer RTF files with older word Processors. LaTeX2RTF
eventually will generate RTF output that is unreadable with your Program. The syntax and semantics of RTF are somewhat artistic, i.e., you can generate a syntactically correct RTF file that cannot be displayed by some/most word processors.
For more details on RTF look at the RTF-Tools by Paul DuBois, and the corresponding newsgroups, etc. http://www.primate.wisc.edu/
LaTeX2RTF is available for many Unix Platforms, for the Macintosh, and for MS-DOS, including all versions of MS Windows 95.
The MS-DOS version (1.8aa and up) will also run under all MS Windows versions. It requires an i386 processor or better. The Win32 Version requires Cygnus-Cygwin32. As the MS-DOS version (1.8aa and up) will also run under all MS windows versions, the Win32 version has been discontinued.
Subsequent to 1.8aa, Scott Prahl has fixed many bugs, improved
handling of tabular environments, significantly improve handling of
equations, added macro expansion of \newcommand definitions, improved handling of
cross references, and added some support for \includegraphics files.
You find the latest version on SourceForge and - with some delay - on CTAN sites: e.g., http://www.dante.de or http://www.ctan.org.
There are a couple of persons working on the LaTeX2RTF revival, coordinated by Wilfried Hennings. Contact the mailing_list for the latest news.
The documentation of the program is found in the doc/ directory in the
file latex2rtf.info in the GNU info format. For your convenience, you
can find .html and .pdf versions of the manual there as well.
To install (on a UNIX system)
Makefile for your local configuration. The install part supports
multiple directories to install to, you will normally only need one. Be
sure to correctly configure the LIBDIR variable to the directory where
support files (ending in .cfg) will be found by the program. This is
normally the same as the LIBINSTALL variable.
make
*.cfg) files. Copy them to a safe place before
installing.
make install
mkdir
doesn't support the -p option) and you do not need multiple install
targets, try:
make simple_install
RTFPATH. This is typically
/usr/local/lib/latex2rtf
make test to test your installation
Open the latex2rtf directory and type
make make test sudo make install
The file L2R.BAT is for use with the DJGPP generated version
LATEX2RT.EXE.
The UNIX and Mac distributions do not contain an executable for DOS / Windows.
Instead, get the DOS / Windows port as file latex2rtf-x.xx_dos.zip
(where x.xx is the version number) from http://sourceforge.net/projects/latex2rtf/
If you want a MacOS X version, make sure that you have installed the developer tools CD that is appropriate for your OS version, and then follow the directions above for UNIX installation.
There is a classic MacOS PPC port of the 1.9k of LaTeX2RTF and I have made a binary distribution of this application. Unfortunately, because I (Scott Prahl) do all development under MacOS X, the binaries for the Classic version often lag (far) behind the current UNIX version.
To convert a LaTeX
file, just drag the file onto the LaTeX2RTF
application icon. The
translation is best if there are .aux and .bbl files in the same folder as
the .tex file to be converted. These should be generated using LaTeX
and
bibtex.
The code for LaTeX2RTF is standard ANSI C. Some possible pitfalls are
gcc.
-Wall and -pedantic and
so may generate errors that were not found in a different development
system. Plese report these, but a quick fix is to remove all compiler
options.
RTFPATH.
HAS_NO_STRDUP in the Makefile when your system
lacks this facility.
make testAll the files in the test directory are converted (with more or less
success) using LaTeX2RTF
and are tested before each CVS check-in and with
all released tarballs. If you have successfully compiled LaTeX2RTF
then
problems are probably caused by
RTFPATH.
HAS_NO_STRDUP in the Makefile when your system
lacks this facility.
LaTeX2RTF
assumes that the .tex file you want to convert is a valid LaTeX
document. The chances of a successful LaTeX2RTF
conversion are slightly better than the
proverbial snowball's if the .tex file doesn't latex properly. Use LaTeX
to find and correct errors before using LaTeX2RTF .
To correctly convert font names you must edit the fonts.cfg configuration file.
This file is used to specify the needed font names and how the LaTeX
default font names
should be converted to RTF. See Font Configuration. LaTeX
variables and user
defined commands are not evaluated. They will be simply ignored. To let LaTeX2RTF
know the
names of variables you can add them in the ignore.cfg file. See Ignore Command Configuration.
The environment variable RTFPATH may contain a search path for the support files (all
files ending in .cfg). If no file is found during the search in the search-path or
if the environment variable is not set, the compiled-in default for the configuration-file
directory is used. If the files are not found at all the program aborts.
In the MS-DOS version the search path is separated by `;' in the Unix version by `:'. For the paths themselves apply `\' and `/'. A separator may appear at the beginning or ending of RTFPATH.
Make sure that the configuration files are in the correct directory. LaTeX2RTF
will need at
least fonts.cfg, direct.cfg, ignore.cfg, english.cfg. You may
have to change one ore more of them to suit your needs. See Configuring LaTeX2RTF.
See Missing and faulty command line options, for actual implementations irregularities.
See Reporting Bugs, for information on how to reach the maintainer.
The LaTeX2RTF command converts a LaTeX file into RTF text format. The text and much of the formatting information is translated to RTF making the new file look similar to the original. The command line syntax is:
latex2rtf [-options] inputfile.[tex]
If inputfile is not specified, standard input is read.
The -options may consist of one or more of the following
-a auxfile
.aux file (for table and figure references) that
differs from inputfile.aux. If this is omitted, the name of the
inputfile with the suffix replaced .aux'will be taken. You must
provide both files (.tex and the .aux) to be able to
convert cross-references in a LaTeX
file. The .aux is created
by running the inputfile.tex through latex.
-b bblfile
bblfile is specified with the -b option, LaTeX2RTF
uses a
inputfile.bbl. The bblfile file is used for citations and is typically
created by running inputfile.aux through bibtex.
-d
-d option determines the amount of debugging information to send to
stderr while translating. `0' means only Errors, `1' Warning Messages
(default) also. These numbers can go as high as `7'.
-i language
\usepackage[language]{babel} where
language is one of the languages supported by the babel package. All
languages listed in the babel system are supported so far as translations for "Chapter,"
"References," and the like. Specific support for specific options of the german style
package are explictly supported. The french translated names are found in the
french.cfg file in the cfg/ directory. See Language Configuration.
-l
-i latin1 (Note that the default behavior is to use ansinew
which is a superset of latin1). Included for
backwards compatibility.
-o outputfile
outputfile is specified with the -o option, the resulting RTF
filename is formed by removing .tex from the inputfile and appending
.rtf.
-C codepage
\usepackage[codepage]{inputenc} This command
is not needed if the above command is already in the LaTeX2e
file. You may select any
of the following code pages: ansinew, applemac, cp437, cp437de, cp850, cp852, cp865,
decmulti, cp1250, cp1252, latin1, latin2, latin3, latin4, latin5, latin9, and next. The
default behavior is to use ansinew (code page 1252).
-V
-W
-Z#
} to the end of the RTF file. This
is useful for files that are not cleanly converted by LaTeX2RTF
.
With the -d option you can specify how much processing information
LaTeX2RTF
reports.
If there is a logfile specified the output goes to this file. Nonetheless
Warnings and Errors are logged to stderr always.
Possible values of -d are
In this chapter you find what styles is LaTeX2RTF supposed to translate correctly to RTF.
LaTeX2RTF
understands most of the commands introduced with LaTeX2e
. It supports both
the old 2.09 version of \documentstyle[options]{format#} and the newer
\documentclass[options]{format}.
It is not necesary to specify the -C option if you use \usepackage{isolatin1}
or \documentstyle[isolatin1]{...}. LaTeX2RTF
automagically detects these
packages/style options and switches to processing of ISO-Latin1 codes.
The following languages from the Babel package are supported: afrikaans, german, nynorsk, spanish, bahasa, dutch, icelandic, polish, swedish, basque, english, portuges, turkish, brazil, esperanto, irish, romanian, usorbian, breton, estonian, italian, samin, welsh, catalan, finnish, latin, scottish, croatian, lsorbian, serbian, czech, french, magyar, slovak, danish, galician, norsk, slovene,
The only thing that these files do is to translate various words usually emitted by LaTeX during processing. For example, this ensures that the LaTeX2RTF will provide the correct translation of the word "Chapter" in the converted document.
You can select any of the above languages using the -l option. This
is not needed if your LaTeX
file contains \usepackage[language]{babel}.
Encountering the german package or documentstyle option (by H. Partl of the
Viena University) makes LaTeX2RTF
behave like that: German Quotes, German
Umlauts by "a, etc.... This support is programmed directly into LaTeX2RTF
and supporting similar features for other languages will require patching the source code.
See Language Configuration, for details on how to write a language.cfg file
for your language by yourself.
Cross references include everything that you might expect and then some: bibliographic citations, equation references, table references, figure references, and section references. Equation, table and figure references are implemented by placing RTF bookmarks around the equation number (or table number or figure number).
Ideally, section references would have been done the same way, but the
crux of the problem is that LaTeX
allows you to tag a section with
\label anywhere in the section. To bookmark the section number,
we need to know if any \label occurs in that section before the
section is processed. A plausible alternative would be to insert a
bookmark when \label is encountered with the proper number, and
then cross-reference these bookmarks. Unfortunately, if the bookmarks
are hidden, then the cross-reference is also hidden. So this did not
work.
So the choices were
\label
.aux file
and lose the link. This is not too bad when the section numbering is not automatic.
Page references work but are implemented as "warm" cross-references. This
means that Word does not automatically update the page references when the file
is opened. To update the page references you must select the entire document
(in Word) and press F9.
Bibliographic references currently require that a valid .aux file be
present. This is where LaTeX2RTF
obtains the reference numbers. It would be
nice if LaTeX2RTF
just automatically numbered the references when there was
no .aux file, but LaTeX2RTF
does not do this yet.
Footnotes are implemented and appear at the bottom of each page.
Indexing is reasonable well supported. The simple mark-up of makeindex
\index{topic!subtopic@\textit{subtopic}}
is supported. The rest of the fancy indexing stuff is not implemented.
The index is created at the location of the \printindex command.
When a file with an index is first opened in Word, you must select the
entire file and update the page references and fields by pressing F9.
Currently, there is no support for \labels of \items in enumerate environments.
The conversion of cross-references is not perfect because of the different
mechanisms in the LaTeX
and Word worlds. In particular, if there are
multiple \label in a figure, table, or section environment then only the first
gets processed. It is also possible to confuse the LaTeX2RTF
in eqnarray environments.
Equations are now converted to RTF fields. This is an interim solution. Ideally the equations would become OLE equation objects in the RTF file, but this needs to be implemented.
It would be nice to have four separate levels of equation translation
ltx2rtf
does and the results are not bad.
The table code is currently barely working. It needs to be rewritten.
One day I will get around to encorporating all graphics formats into the
RTF file. This will probably be done using imagemagick to do
the actual translation to formats that are supported by Word and then
embedding the supported format in RTF.
If there is no \pagestyle command, the RTF output is generated as with plain
pagestyle, i.e. each page get's its page number centered at the bottom.
You must turn this off with the \pagestyle{empty} command in the LaTeX file if you don't want pagenumbers. The headings and myheadings styles are silently ignored by now. The twosided option to the \documentstyle or \documentclass produces the corresponding RTF tokens. Note that these features require RTF Version 1.4.
Hyperlatex support is largely broken at the moment.
Otfried Schwarzkopf has created the "Hyperlatex Markup Language" which is a "little package that allows you to use LaTeX to prepare documents in HTML." It brings an Emacs lisp program with it to convert the Hyperlatex file to HTML. Hyperlatex can be obtained from the CTAN-sites, See Availability. There are two handsome commands that avoid typing: \link and \xlink that generate an "internal" label which then is used in the following \Ref and \Pageref commands.
LaTeX makes it possible to write `\link{anchor}[ltx]{label}', which typesets: `anchor ltx'. LaTeX2RTF does NOT support this aproach since the optional parameter is thrown away right now, See LaTeX2RTF under Development.
Note that you have to update your .cfg files if you are upgrading, since
there are a lot of HTML oriented commands in Hyperlatex that we simply can
`ignore'.
On processing input LaTeX2RTF
first converts the LaTeX
special characters. If
it encounters one of the standard commands it is converted internally. If a
command is not known to LaTeX2RTF
it is first looked up in
direct.cfg and the RTF code specified there is output. If not found there it
is looked up in the section ignore.cfg. This file includes a lot of LaTeX
commands that do not affect the output (cross reference information and the like), or that we are not able or willing to convert to RTF.
You can use ignore.cfg if you get tired of seeing
WARNING: command: `foo' not found - ignoredand you don't need `foo' in your RTF document. It would be nice to send your additions to the LaTeX2RTF mailing list for inclusion in later distributions.
LaTeX2RTF accepts Unix, MS-DOS, and Macintosh line ending codes (\n, \r\n and \r). The files it creates are the line ending for the platform on which LaTeX2RTF was compiled.
The LaTeX
file may have been created with a wide variety of character
sets. If the LaTeX
lacks the \package[codepage]{inputenc}
definition, then you may need to use the command line switch to manually
select the proper code page. See Input Encoding.
On writing output, LaTeX2RTF
generates \n as line ending code.
Your RTF Reader should accept this on any platform. If you ftp your RTF file
from or to MS-DOS platforms the line ending code can be converted to \r\n. As
this should also be legal to any RTF Reader the resulting RTF rendering should
not be affected.
LaTeX2RTF
does not offer a whole lot of flexibility in how files are translated,
but it does offer some. This flexibility resides in four files direct.cfg,
ignore.cfg, fonts.cfg, and language.cfg. These filese
are documented in the next four sections.
The file direct.cfg is used for converting LaTeX
commands by simple text
replacement. The format consists of lines with a LaTeX
command with backslash
followed by comma. The rest of the line until a . character will be written
to the RTF file when the command is found in the LaTeX
file. Lines
starting with a # character are ignored. After the . everything is ignored
to end of line. To select a specific font use *fontname*, where
fontname be defined in fonts.cfg.
To write the * character use **.
\alpha,{\f*Symbol* a}. #alpha in the Symbol Font
\copyright,\'a9.
The file ignore.cfg is used for defining how to ignore specific commands. This
file is used for recognition of LaTeX
variables, user defined variables, and
some simple commands. All variables are ignored but the converter must know the
names to correctly ignore assignments to variables. Lines in this file consist
of a variable name with backslash, followed by comma and the type of the
variable followed by .. Possible types are
NUMBER
MEASURE
OTHER
= and from there to next
space. e.g., \setbox\bak=\hbox
COMMAND
\ and from there to the occurence of anything
but a letter e.g., \newbox\bak
SINGLE
\noindent
PARAMETER
\foo{bar}
PACKAGE
ENVCMD
eg. `ENVCMD,environ.' Therefore \begin{environ} text
\end{environ}' as `text'.
ENVIRONMENT
\begin{ifhtml} text \end{ifhtml} ignores `text'.
The types are in upper case exactly as above. Do not use spaces. Lines starting
with a # character are ignored. After the . everything is ignored to end of
line. Example:
\pagelength,MEASURE.
The file fonts.cfg contains the font name mapping. For example, this
file determine what font is used to represent \rm characters in the RTF file.
A line consists of a font name in LaTeX
followed by comma and a font
name in RTF. The end is marked by a .. No spaces are allowed. The
LaTeX
font will be converted to the RTF font when it is found
in the LaTeX
file. If multiple translations for the same LaTeX
font are
specified, only the first is used. All fonts in a LaTeX
file that are
not in this file will be mapped to the default font. All RTF fonts
listed in this file will be in every RTF file header whether used or
not. Lines starting with a # character are ignored. After the
. everything is ignored to end of line.
To add a RTF font not
used as substitute for a LaTeX
font -- for example a Symbol font used
in direct.cfg -- use a dummy LaTeX
name like in the following
Dummy3,MathematicalSymbols.
Make sure you use the correct font name. Take care of spaces in font names. The
default fonts are named Roman \rm, Slanted \sl, Sans Serif
\sf, Typewriter \tt, or Calligraphic \cal.
The file(s) language.cfg control the translation of LaTeX
's "hardcoded"
sectioning names.
The standard LaTeX
styles have some fixed Title names like `Part', `Reference'
or `Bibliography' that appeared in English or German in the output with the
original versions of LaTeX2RTF
.
It is unlikely that you will need to create a new language.cfg file.
However, just look at one of the existing files and follow the pattern.
The format is really simple.
As stated in the Debugging section, LaTeX2RTF
provides a means to control
the amount of debugging information through the -d# switch.
By using a debugging level of 4, you can get a pretty good idea of what
LaTeX
command caused the problem and what line that command might be
found on.
Fatal error messages
Error messages
Warning messages
ignore.cfg
file.
Error and Warning messages should follow the GNU Coding standards, i.e. they have the format
inputfile':line: Error|Warning: message
You can also control the level of debugging output by inserting \verbositylevel{#}
in the LaTeX
file. This is very handy if you have a large LaTeX
file
that is failing in only a small section. For example,
problem free latex file ....
\verbositylevel{5}
problematic code
\verbositylevel{0}
will cause a huge amount of debugging information to be emitted
for the problematic code.
Error reporting and logging still has many inconsistencies, but it gets better with each release. Don't try to make any sense in debugging levels above 4, these are for my own delight only and can change significantly between versions.
The inputfile may be incorrectly identified if it is incorporated
through \input or \include. The line may be also be wrong
at times. See Known Bugs.
\documentstyle
\field commands are not implemented.
\markboth and \markright.
\tableofcontents there would be two approaches: Transfer
sectioning information, title text and let produce pagenumber by the rtf-
reader. Scan and label all of the sectioning commands while reading and
then construct the sectioning information using these labels. Needs two
passes on LaTeX
input.
In this section you find comments about missing and buggy command line options.
-V
-d
-?
-q
-q (quiet) option, to suppress Warning Messages. By
now this can be achieved by the -d0 option.
-rmajor.minor
It would be useful to implement the GNU long option names, e.g.: `-debug', `-output_file', `-quiet', etc.
\input).
Report bugs to Georg Lehner). Ralf Schlatterbeck is no longer the maintainer. Please provide the following information and observe the following guidelines when reporting a bug in the program:
-V option to LaTeX2RTF
.
Scott's ToDo list
\input
Georg's todo list
The following comes from Ralf:
\newtheorem should be supported