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I wrote an article containing quite a lot of maths using latex. I want to submit this paper to a given journal. However, submission guideline explicitly states that all submissions must be done in word format. I am a bit confused about such a specification and really feel unconfortable to reedit everything in word. Some companies seem to offer convertor or online conversion. Maybe some of you have already experienced some of them and can give me some feedback and advices.

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    submission guideline explicitly states that all submissions must be done in word format. — Submit elsewhere.
    – JeffE
    Dec 6, 2013 at 19:05
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    In physics as in mathematics all the "real" journals accept LaTeX submissions--indeed most of them prefer LaTeX--and this would be a bad sign concerning the quality of the journal.
    – dmckee --- ex-moderator kitten
    Dec 6, 2013 at 19:45
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    See here for a list of converters: How can I convert math-less latex documents into Microsoft Word?
    – Martin Schröder
    Dec 6, 2013 at 21:11
  • What is this "math-less latex" of which you speak?
    – JeffE
    Dec 7, 2013 at 2:16
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    And then I was complaining a journal wouldn't let me use the glossaries package...
    – gerrit
    Dec 7, 2013 at 17:55

4 Answers 4

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I've used pandoc for this problem previously and it worked pretty well. Problems I have encountered are;

  • Multi-line equations (e.g. align or matrix environments) are not converted correctly to word. (I don't think there is an equivalent of align in word).
  • Converted all citations to the ones within parentheses (much more minor a fix).

Last publication I did this because I got so frustrated with the journal (it would accept and compile my Latex file, but gave no instructions about what packages I could use nor any instructions on how to get the bibliography to compile - and emailing for three weeks with the staff did not help). But it only took me a few hours to convert the paper (that publication had minimal math though).

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  • If as Peter mentions the article wants the math in images, pandoc can do that (and does it better I think) than converting the formula to the MathML that Word uses. Also good to keep in mind if the journal allows just the PDF to be submitted.
    – Andy W
    Dec 6, 2013 at 18:10
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I can sympathize with your situation but unfortunately there is not much you can do if the journal explicitly asks for Word files except to provide them. As was stated in a comment you can (and should) contact the journal to ask about the use of LaTeX. Most large publishers handle LaTeX but the individual journals (editors) may not be aware of this and may not use LaTeX themselves so as to see the benefits. I doubt anyone would change their local policy based on one manuscript but if they are not aware that people wish to submit LaTeX files, nothing will ever change.

If you ask editors about LaTeX, remember to also ask them about formats for supplying equations. In some cases, journals accept the built in so-called equation editor in Word and in some cases they may request equations as graphics. They should however, have some standard way of handling such, since I assume your manuscript cannot be the only one they ever published that includes equations.

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For quite some time, Word has allowed equations to be entered in LaTex. It shouldn't be a big deal to handle all your equations in one session, and get your paper out the door. A good text editor like notepad++ would be a big help.

You might also look to see if there is any tool in the OpenOffice or LibreOffice suites that might help.

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  • This question is from Dec 6, 2013. Perhaps you could list when Word added in it's LaTeX equation editor.
    – Richard Erickson
    Jul 1, 2022 at 14:37
  • Word's equations feature that is similar to Latex appeared in 2006, in the version called Word 2007. The syntax is similar to Latex but it is not identical. Equation Editor was different - it was the old plugin for Word that was superseded by this native feature in 2006. See superuser.com/a/1201596.
    – Oliver882
    Jul 2, 2022 at 10:37
  • It was quite a lot worse than LaTeX the last time I used it.
    – Anonymous Physicist
    Jul 2, 2022 at 19:08
  • support.microsoft.com/en-us/office/….
    – Scott Seidman
    Jul 2, 2022 at 22:48
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Try Adobe's pdf-to-word converter. Apart from some issues with equations, works extremely well.

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