Converting Latex to MS Word docx (almost perfectly)

Many of students and academics write academic papers and reports on Latex due to the ease of formatting and managing citations and bibliography. However, collaborative editing Latex tools have not reached the level of versatility and convenience of Microsoft Word and Google Docs. We then often begin writing the paper in Word when major comments, additions and changes are made, and later manually translate it to Latex, which is a tedious task and just a waste of time.

A way around this hurdle is to use Pandoc to automatically convert Latex files to Word documents. To install Pandoc on Linux, open a terminal run sudo apt-get install pandoc pandoc-citeproc texlive, while Windows executables and MacOS instructions are available here. To run Pandoc on a Latex document:

1. Open a terminal (on Windows, hold the Windows key and press “r,” then type “cmd” in the command bar)
2. Use the “cd” command to navigate to the folder where your Latex document it.
3. Type pandoc -s latex_document.tex --bibliography=bib_file.bib -o output_word_document.docx.

Now you should have a Word document with all your bitmap (png, jpeg, bmp, etc.) figures, equations in Word format and with a bibliography based on your citations and bib file. If the latest version of Pandoc does not work, try version 1.19.1.

There are some known limitations, though. Numbering and referencing equations, figures and tables, and referencing sections will not work and you will have to number those by hand. This limitation seems to apply only to outputting Word documents and you can circumvent them by outputting to other formats with Pandoc reference filters plus the appropriate Pandoc calls and specific latex syntax (see filters’ pages for details). Vectorized figures will not be included in the output document (svg, eps, pdf, etc.). On the other hand, bitmaps will appear in the output document and will preserve their captions.

Hopefully some skilled programmer feeling like generously volunteering his time for the Latex academic cause will address the mentioned limitations soon. Until then, we will have to go around them by hand.