[Tex/LaTex] Convert TeX to non-TeX and back

Question

I wrote my thesis in LaTeX and now my advisor would like to go in and manually make changes. I had assumed he would mark up a pdf or printed document, and then hand those changes to me to make, but he insists on actually making the changes himself. However, he does not know how to use LaTeX and does not want to deal with editing a plain text file with all the LaTeX markup everywhere.

What is the best way to convert my LaTeX document into something he can edit (preferably something he can open in Microsoft Word) so that it will still be in a format that I can easily convert it back into a LaTeX document?

Answer 1

Pandoc can convert between quite a few formats. Extract from the manual:

Pandoc converts files from one markup format to another. It can read markdown and (subsets of) reStructuredText, HTML, and LaTeX, and it can write plain text, markdown, reStructuredText, HTML, LaTeX, ConTeXt, Texinfo, groff man, MediaWiki markup, RTF, OpenDocument XML, ODT, DocBook XML, and S5 HTML slide shows.

It can convert to ODT, which is close enough to DOC, but you'll loose quite a bit by doing so.

To make it easy enough without loosing your soul, I'd convert it to markdown, which is both easy and efficient.

Keep in mind that if you're using tricky things in LaTeX (specific packages, your own macros or environments), you won't get any good conversion results.