LaTeX/Export To Other Formats
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Strictly speaking, LaTeX source can be used to directly generate two formats:
- DVI using latex, the first one to be supported
- PDF using pdflatex, more recent
Using other software freely available on Internet, you can easily convert DVI and PDF to other document formats. In particular, you can obtain the PostScript version using software coming within your LaTeX distribution. Some LaTeX IDE will give you the possibility to generate the PostScript version directly (even if it uses internally a DVI mid-step, e.g. LaTeX → DVI → PS). It is also possible to create PDF from DVI and vice versa. It doesn't seem logical to create a file with two steps when you can create it straight away, but some users might need it because, as you remember from the first chapters, the format you can generate depends upon the formats of the images you want to include (EPS for DVI, PNG and JPG for PDF). Here you will find sections about different formats with description about how to get it.
Other formats can be produced, such as RTF (which can be used in Microsoft Word) and HTML. However, these documents are produced from software that parses and interprets the LaTeX files, and do not implement all the features available for the primary DVI and PDF outputs. Nonetheless, they do work, and can be crucial tools for collaboration with colleagues that do not edit documents with LaTeX.
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[edit] Convert to PDF
[edit] Directly
pdflatex my_file
[edit] DVI to PDF
dvipdfm my_file.dvi
will create my_file.pdf. Another way is to pass through PS generation:
dvi2ps myfile.dvi ps2pdf myfile.ps
you will get also a file called my_file.ps that you can delete.
[edit] Merging PDF
If you have created different PDF documents and you want to merge them into one single PDF file you can use the following command-line command. You need to have Ghostscript installed:
For Windows:
gswin32 -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=Merged.pdf -dBATCH 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf
For Linux:
gs -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=Merged.pdf -dBATCH 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf
Another option to check out is pdftk (or PDF toolkit), which is a command-line tool that can manipulate PDFs in many ways. To merge one or more files, use:
pdftk 1.pdf 2.pdf 3.pdf cat output 123.pdf
Note: If you are merging external PDF documents into a Latex document which is compiled with pdflatex, a much simpler option is to use the pdfpages package, e.g.:
\usepackage{pdfpages} ... \includepdf[pages=-]{Document1.pdf} \includepdf[pages=-]{Document2.pdf} ...
Three simple shell scripts using the pdfpages package are provided in the pdfjam bundle by D. Firth. They include options for merge several pdf (pdfjoin), put several pages in one physical sheet (pdfnup) and rotate pages (pdf90).
[edit] XeTeX
You can also use XeTeX (or, more precisely, XeLaTeX), which works in the same way as pdflatex: it creates a PDF file directly from LaTeX source. One advantage of XeTeX over standard LaTeX is support for Unicode and modern typography. See its Wikipedia entry for more details.
[edit] Convert to PostScript
- from PDF
pdf2ps my_file.pdf
- from DVI
dvi2ps my_file.dvi
[edit] Convert to RTF
LaTeX can be converted into an RTF file, which in turn can be opened by Microsoft Word and OpenOffice.org Writer. This conversion is done through latex2rtf, which can run on any computer platform. The program operates by reading the LaTeX source, and mimicking the behaviour of the LaTeX program. latex2rtf supports most of the standard implementations of LaTeX, such as standard formatting, some math typesetting, inclusion of EPS, PNG or JPG graphics, and tables. As well, it has some limited support for packages, such as varioref, and natbib. However, many other packages are not supported.
latex2rtf is simple to use. The Windows version has a GUI, which is straightforward to use. The command-line version is offered for all platforms, and can be used on an example mypaper.tex file:
latex mypaper bibtex mypaper # if you use bibtex latex2rtf mypaper
Both latex and (if needed) bibtex commands need to be run before latex2rtf, because the .aux and .bbl files are needed to produce the proper output. The result of this conversion will create myfile.rtf, which you may open in many modern word processors. Microsoft Word users can save this file as a myfile.doc to use features included with that program, such as "Track changes".
[edit] Convert to HTML
There are many converters to HTML. One option is the HEVEA program:
- LaTeX
hevea mylatexfile
- BibTeX
bibtex2html mybibtexfile
- TeX4ht
TeX4ht is a very powerful conversion program, but its configuration is not straightforward. Basically a configuration file has to be prepared, and then the program is called.
[edit] Convert to image formats
[edit] PNG
To convert from PDF, open your file with GIMP. It will ask you which page you want to convert, whether you want to use anti-aliasing (choose strong if you want to get something similar to what you see on the screen). Try different resolutions to fit your needs, but 100 dpi should be enough. Once you have the image within GIMP, you can post-process it as you like and save it to any format supported by GIMP, as PNG for example. A method for DVI files is dvipng (usage is the same as dvipdfm). Also, the "convert" command from the ImageMagick suite can convert both DVI and PDF files to PNG.
You can optimize the resulting image using optipng so that it will take up less space.
[edit] SVG
Convert it to PS as described before, then use the bash script ps2svg.sh (it could be possible to write a step-by-step guide for Windows as well; all the software it uses is multiplatform).
One can also use dvisvgm, an open source utility that converts from DVI to SVG.
[edit] Convert to plain text
If you are thinking of converting to plain text to perform a spell-checking or count words, read Tips and Tricks first.
Most LaTeX distributions come with detex program, which strips LaTeX commands. It can handle multi-file projects, so all you need is to give one command:
detex yourfile
(note the omission of .tex extension). This will output result to standard output. If you want the plain text go to a file, use
detex yourfile > yourfile.txt
If the output from detex does not satisfy you, you can try a newer version available on Google Code, or use HTML conversion first and then copy text from your browser.
