[Tex/LaTex] Office 2013 handling of (Xe)LaTex PDFs

conversionmsword

I just read that Office 2013 now includes PDF import and editing functionality, so that it converts the PDF automatically into a format that could be edited and saved as a .doc. I was wondering whether anyone has had a chance to play with this, and if so how well it handles academic papers written in Latex/Xelatex, especially with respect to footnotes, multiple languages or fonts, and citations/references (and math, though this isn't as important to me personally). It would be nice to get some sense of how well it works before considering upgrading to the 2013 suite, since I'm sure that will come with its own set of new UI, etc. headaches.

Best Answer

I'm pretty impressed of the result actually and for reference, footnote and endnote it does a good job. Although footnote aren't translate as Word footnote. What the converter actually does to preserve the aspect of the paper is adding tabulation and other format characters. Also it does not handle accents for I tried with a report I wrote in French (yeah I'm a french canadian) and every accent were added in front of the letter in this manner " `e " a simple search and replace should do the job but with other small corrections it starts to become a lot, especially if you want to add large part of text. So it might not be as good as pdf directly compiled from LaTeX, but if you have to submit a report to your employer because the business only work with word it is a good way to translate PDF to .doc although it might need small change in the layout of the document (pagebreak need to be reinserted).

PS: the summary will not update you have to change mannually the page number, but again if you do change so again it's more to create a .doc version of your document when .doc are needed.

PPS: I quite like Word 2013 it can be useful by adding shortcuts were needed and not adding more button in the Ui bar it's more efficient than other versions, it's handling more thing without having to search for the correct button for the circumstance, i.e. converting a PDF file is simply done by openning it with the open button.