I was disappointed to discover that IEEE Pervasive Magazine need my article as a Microsoft Word document because they don’t know how to handle LaTeX files. I don’t understand how a serious scientific society or a professional editor can not be able to handle plain text files, especially since the final typesetting probably takes place in another piece of software.
Fortunately, I found the GrindEQ LaTeX-to-Word converter, a sort of plugin for Word which allows you to open .tex files. It adds some menus to the Word ribbons (toolbars at the top of the page) and makes Word able to open .tex files from the usual File -> Open menu. When you open a LaTeX file, GrindEQ will remind you that you can only run it 10 times before having to register. It may also encourage you to install Ghostscript if you work with EPS files. Remember to set the LaTeX encoding to UTF-8 or whatever you use if you want accented characters to appear correctly.
I was very impressed with the formatting. Almost everything was correct. It’s not the prettiest Word document and it doesn’t seem to use the Word styles (eg., header 1, header 2, paragraph) but the equations and figures were mostly correct. Here are the errors that I noticed.
- In one equation, the norm symbols (double bars) had been replaced by a ‘P’ character in special font.
- A numbered list which was programmed to start from a value greater than 1 didn’t.
- The title was missing and the document started with a blank page.
- Some figures which were laid out in LaTeX using the
\subfloatcommand were displayed in sequence with their subcaptions. I created a table to hold these figures. - At a few places in the text, the letters
ieeetrappeared because I was using the bibunits package with that particular style of bibliography. - I used bibunits to create two bibliographies. LaTeX numbers them both starting from 1, but in Word they were all in one continuous sequence. This is not a problem because the reference numbers are consistent between the text and the bibliography.