[Tex/LaTex] How to collaborate with those who work in Word

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I write my papers in LaTeX and always reference the same, giant .bib file for citations (natbib+bibtex or biblatex, depending on journal or document requirements).

If this is your mode of operation, how do you collaborate with those who work in Word? Do you keep a parallel Endnote/Zotero file?

Clarification The purpose is so that I can contribute my sections in MS Word; not convert colleagues to LaTeX or always be the manager of the master document as project needs often dictate that someone else (MS Word user) will be managing the master document. E.g., there are cases in which I am the only LaTeX user out of 20+ collaborators.

Best Answer

When I have to work on MS Word documents, I wrote my part in a LaTeX file as usual (and enjoy my emacs+AUCTeX shortcuts). Then I convert the document using pandoc to odt and copy/paste my document into the official one (usually a .docx). It probably possible to convert directly to Docx (pandoc seems to support it)

The big avantage of pandoc is it can take the references cited in our document from the big .bib file and display it in a odt/docx file. You will not have plenty style related options but it does the job.

pandoc test.tex -o output.odt --bibliography /my/bibliography.bib -s

Here is a MWE in another answer for that.

If you use Emacs, RefTeX has also a useful option which allows you to create automatically a small .bib file with all the references cited in a specific LaTeX file. This is very nice for sending to publishers only relevant references. You have to call this command when visiting the LaTeX file :

M-x reftex-create-bibtex-file