[Tex/LaTex] How to convert PDF to (La)TeX

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I know that hardly any information is passed to the PDF when a .tex file is compiled.

But is there a tool that can convert a PDF document back to (La)TeX?

Best Answer

If you install AbiWord with the additional import and export plugins,* you can open a PDF file in the Word Processor, and then export to LaTeX. In fact, you can also convert from the command line:

abiword --to=tex filename.pdf

Be warned that both its PDF import routine and its LaTeX export routine have serious limitations, and you should not expect anything that will be usable without serious tweaking afterwards.

(* IIRC, the extra plugins are installed by selecting a custom install on Windows and checking all the import and export options it gives you. For Linux, you typically need to install a separate package called "abiword-plugins" or "abiword-plugin-mathview" depending on distro. No clue for Mac.)

Inkscape can open PDFs and export to either PSTricks or TikZ codes; this might be useful if the PDF in question is just a diagram or vector image you want to edit.

There's a project listed on sourceforge called pdf2latex, but it doesn't look like any real work has been done on it. I'm not sure it's a real project. (The page looks fishy; almost as if someone was just posting an idea.)

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

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.

[Tex/LaTex] How to convert PDF to EPS

Here is a Linux script pdf2eps. It can easily be translated into a batch script for Windows.

#!/bin/sh
# $Id: pdf2eps,v 0.01 2005/10/28 00:55:46 Herbert Voss Exp $
# Convert PDF to encapsulated PostScript.
# usage:
# pdf2eps <page number> <pdf file without ext>

pdfcrop $2.pdf
pdftops -f $1 -l $1 -eps "$2-crop.pdf" 
rm  "$2-crop.pdf"
mv  "$2-crop.eps" $2.eps

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

[Tex/LaTex] How to convert PDF to EPS

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