[Tex/LaTex] How to make apostrophes appear normally when copy-pasting from a MS Word document

copy/pastemswordpunctuationsymbols

I have a report written in MS Word which I would like to turn into a LaTeX document. I copy-pasted the content of the document in my LaTeX editor (TeXShop, LaTeX, pdfTeX) and everything comes out fine except for the apostrophes ' which come out as ? (so for example, instead of outputting I'm, I?m is output instead).

In my LaTeX editor, the apostrophes appear as they should, it's only in the compiled pdf document that they are turned into ?.

For a strange reason, I've noticed that if I delete (in the editor) an apostrophe and retype the same apostrophe in the editor, then they are output normally. This trick doesn't work if I do Find and Replace, so the solution I have up to now is simply to manually delete and retype each apostrophe in the text.

This however is very time consuming so I would love to find a better solution!

Best Answer

Word auto corrects input ' to the typographically correct ’. LaTeX does this, too.

You can try to search-and-replace all ’ to ' in Word itself or
Use another input encoding, for example UTF8: \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to make listings code indentation remain unchanged when copied from PDF

To prevent random spaces when copying the text from a listing, you need to use

\lstset{columns=flexible}

But you will now note that the text is not neatly aligned anymore; to solve this, you need to also use

\lstset{keepspaces=true}

This will not solve your problem with spaces disappearing at the beginning of lines when copying. The following hack will produce visible spaces and then make them invisible by coloring them in the background color:

\makeatletter
\def\lst@outputspace{{\ifx\lst@bkgcolor\empty\color{white}\else\lst@bkgcolor\fi\lst@visiblespace}}
\makeatother

This hack is not perfect, however, as the typesetted character is really a visible space, not a space (so searching the pdf for char line will not work) and some PDF readers (like Mac's preview) will copy a visible space. It works under Acrobat Reader and it's extremely pleasant to be able to quickly copy/paste code without problem (perhaps the problem can be circumvented by writing direct PDF code to tell that it's a space, I've never had the time to try). It might also not work with all typewriter fonts.

Here's the full code of your example:

\documentclass[12pt,oneside]{memoir}

\usepackage{listings}
\usepackage[T1]{fontenc}
\usepackage{xcolor}
\usepackage{textcomp}

\definecolor{codebg}{HTML}{EEEEEE}
\definecolor{codeframe}{HTML}{CCCCCC}

\lstset{language=Awk}
\lstset{backgroundcolor=\color{codebg}}
\lstset{frame=single}
\lstset{framesep=10pt}
\lstset{rulecolor=\color{codeframe}}
\lstset{upquote=true}
\lstset{basicstyle=\ttfamily}
\lstset{showstringspaces=false}

\lstset{columns=flexible}
\lstset{keepspaces=true}
\makeatletter
\def\lst@outputspace{{\ifx\lst@bkgcolor\empty\color{white}\else\lst@bkgcolor\fi\lst@visiblespace}}
\makeatother

\begin{document}

This code example prints out all users on your system:

\begin{lstlisting}[language=c]
#include <stdio.h>
#include <stdlib.h>
#include <string.h>

#define MAX_LINE_LEN 1024

int main() {
    char line[MAX_LINE_LEN];
    FILE *in = fopen("/etc/passwd", "r");
    if (!in) exit(EXIT_FAILURE);

    while (fgets(line, MAX_LINE_LEN, in) != NULL) {
        char *sep = strchr(line, ':');
        if (!sep) exit(EXIT_FAILURE);
        *sep = '\0';
        printf("%s\n", line);
    }
    fclose(in);
    return EXIT_SUCCESS;
}
\end{lstlisting}

\end{document}

[Tex/LaTex] How to convert a scientific manuscript from LaTeX to Word using Pandoc

I tried nearly all methods mentioned in other answers.

Eventually, and surprisingly, I found the most satisfactory way to convert is to just open the PDF file in MS Word (2013 or newer), which retained most of the layout. Although you are gonna lose the hyperlinks of cross-references.

Best Answer

Related Solutions

[Tex/LaTex] How to make listings code indentation remain unchanged when copied from PDF

[Tex/LaTex] How to convert a scientific manuscript from LaTeX to Word using Pandoc

Related Question