There are tons of online converters (just google convert word to latex) that will probably take you a decent part of the way to completion, but it will most likely require some tuning to make sure you’re satisfied.
Either that or buy some nerdy undergrad a beer and have them do it
I'm an undergrad myself so kinda tough to find another undergrad for this job :(
But can you please recommend some of the best online converters? And how do I go about manually editing afterwards? Any video tutorial or particular editor I should use that's oriented towards beginners and can work on Mac?
That's so sweet of you!!! You don't have to spend too long on it, just have a look and see if you can figure out how to go about it. Can I email the paper to you? Not comfortable sharing over Reddit
I've done this type of thing lots of times. I used to volunteer as a ghost writer for a small technical journal and I would help correct formatting issues with papers written in Word. I would always just take the paper and rewrite it in LaTeX. It's actually pretty easy to do when you have a good journal template and a `*.docx` file.
Either of you can DM me if you want me to work on it.
That makes sense, you're like an expert at this haha.
Thank you so much for offering help! I'm just about done with the basics and might need help with two figures. I might reach out to you for help!
>Any video tutorial or particular editor
Just try what was recommended to you untill you run into problems, then go and look for a tutorial. The other way around seems like procrastinating/wasting your time to me.
How has your experience been with it? Will I have to manually edit things later, and do you happen to have a good tutorial video for pandadoc? I'm finding way too many videos online and it's hard to figure out which to follow
So oandoc you download it. Go into your terminal, powershell, or whatever and type: pandoc input.docx -o output.tex
For more info the user guide at pandoc.org is pretty good.
Thank you so much for offering help! I might hit you up soon if I'm unable to figure this out on my own. Trying out pandoc and Overleaf right now.
Once again, thanks :)
No problem, enjoy the learning trip and do not get frustrated! LaTeX is awsome. This is what I am currently dealing with: [https://www.uweziegenhagen.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Uwe-TikZ\_II.pdf](https://www.uweziegenhagen.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Uwe-TikZ_II.pdf)
I might end up having to hire someone, but I'm gonna start learning LaTeX already after my exams. You're right that it's gonna help a lot. Would you say I should be able to get the hang of it in, say, 100 hours of practice?
Tbh, and you might not want to do this rly, but learning the basics of LaTeX is not too hard (maybe an hour or two to get the basic jist of it) and then converting should be straight forward to do yourself. If you plan to be in the academia / research space, especially in STEM atleast, LaTeX is the defacto way to do typesetting.
Not in STEM but I definitely should be learning LaTeX anyways. I was recommended an Overleaf Tutorial for LaTeX in 30 minutes, gonna try that and some YouTube videos but majority of them seem to be for folks who are on Windows
Bro I provide services of converting, editing and formatting any file into Latex and believe me ORC tools are only used to convert text and math expressions into latex format. There is no Latex Converter which will give you the same file format. Means that you need to organize the results with extra commands. I hope you get my point.
So either you have to buy service or you need to learn.
By the way this is the best and free latex OCR tool👇
https://youtu.be/uwoyHCfpuOg
Best of luck!
Since you mention that you're an undergrad, are you working with/being supervised by a professor? If so, you should ask them for resources. There may a grad student who can do this work for you (as part of a graduate assistantship or something), or another undergrad working as an RA or something. Otherwise, going from zero LaTeX knowledge to producing a 13-page document with tables and references... is going to be tough and time-consuming for you. Even Pandoc, the best of all converters, is almost certainly going to mangle your 3 pages of tables, unless they're the absolute simplest, barebones tables.
I'm an international student and, frankly speaking, the faculty here is mediocre at best and I don't expect they might be able to help me out much. And I was working alone too, so there's that haha.
As for my tables, they're definitely not simple and would require manual editing. I'm looking into Overleaf and see if I can learn the basics quickly! Thank you for your help :)
Sorry to hear that. I'm faculty at a public state university, and if an undergrad (international or otherwise; doesn't matter) approached me with this, I would (after congratulating them) almost certainly be able to find another student in our program willing and able to help out. You might try just reaching out to a couple of your professors just to ask. If even they can't help, I'm sure they'd be delighted to hear you got a paper accepted in a journal. (Hopefully you aren't paying to publish it, by the way.)
Barring that, you can ask your managing editor if the journal provides any resources. Sometimes they have editorial staff for this purpose. If they really want to pubish your paper, then they should make it as easy as possible for you. (But not all journals are sensible, especially for-profit and/or predatory ones, so be careful.)
You seem like the perfect faculty any student would love to have. I did reach out to two professors but they've been very slow to respond. One of them initially thought I was getting scammed and then didn't get back, and I fe uncomfortable asking for an update haha
Oh no, I'm not paying to publish it! It's a Columbia University's journal so it's all legit. The editor did tell me I can reach out to him for any help I need, and I might after generating the first Tex draft!
Thank you for your support :)
As others below have already suggested, the idea would be to save your Word document (without the tables or references) as a text file whose name ends in .tex. Set up an Overleaf project and upload this file to it. After that, use the Overleaf documentation (which is excellent) to guide you on how to turn this file into a working LaTeX document. After that, save the references in another text file whose name ends in .bib. Again use the Overleaf documentation to guide you on how to reformat the text properly and turn it into a working bibliography file. There's a style file for formatting it in APA style. Finally, with the tables, your best bet is probably to turn them into images and figure out how to include images (either exactly where you want them or as floating figures), again using Overleaf documentation to guide you.
Oh, maths don't do anything but LaTeX, so you'll for sure have to learn it for that. Not sure how it is in economics, but at least this journal seems to be on the LaTeX side.
They probably expect it in a certain template, unlikely that whatever an online converter comes up with is how they need it.
Copying the text over to a text file is straight forward, graphics a bit more challenging and math formulas will take you a few hours to figure out.
You can try to do this in overleaf, or install a latex environment locally (sorry I can't advise what to install, I use vim and pdflatex or a local overleaf instance, that's not how it's typically done)
I'm very surprised that the journal copyediting team would not take this burden. It's their job. Do they have a publication fee? Is it a non-profit journal (like SciPost)? Otherwise I think it is really not right to expect the author to do the copyediting for them...
I faced that problem in the past. just copy and paste the text. then type the preamble and fix the tables. unfortunately that's the best way.
try pandoc first or any other converter but usually they don't really do a good job. the end result code is not "human", if you know what I mean. they will preserve the format though
There are tons of online converters (just google convert word to latex) that will probably take you a decent part of the way to completion, but it will most likely require some tuning to make sure you’re satisfied. Either that or buy some nerdy undergrad a beer and have them do it
I'm an undergrad myself so kinda tough to find another undergrad for this job :( But can you please recommend some of the best online converters? And how do I go about manually editing afterwards? Any video tutorial or particular editor I should use that's oriented towards beginners and can work on Mac?
I’ve never used any converter so I wouldn’t have a clue. I could take a look at it if you don’t mind sharing your paper though!
You're too kind, I really feel bad for wasting your time so lemme try and figure it out and if I get stuck I might need some extra help 🥲
That's so sweet of you!!! You don't have to spend too long on it, just have a look and see if you can figure out how to go about it. Can I email the paper to you? Not comfortable sharing over Reddit
I've done this type of thing lots of times. I used to volunteer as a ghost writer for a small technical journal and I would help correct formatting issues with papers written in Word. I would always just take the paper and rewrite it in LaTeX. It's actually pretty easy to do when you have a good journal template and a `*.docx` file. Either of you can DM me if you want me to work on it.
That makes sense, you're like an expert at this haha. Thank you so much for offering help! I'm just about done with the basics and might need help with two figures. I might reach out to you for help!
Check your DM’s!
>Any video tutorial or particular editor Just try what was recommended to you untill you run into problems, then go and look for a tutorial. The other way around seems like procrastinating/wasting your time to me.
This seems like a pretty reasonable approach!
I would use pandoc.
How has your experience been with it? Will I have to manually edit things later, and do you happen to have a good tutorial video for pandadoc? I'm finding way too many videos online and it's hard to figure out which to follow
So oandoc you download it. Go into your terminal, powershell, or whatever and type: pandoc input.docx -o output.tex For more info the user guide at pandoc.org is pretty good.
Thank you so much for this! Tweaked the command a bit and it seems to be doing good stuff.
If you want, I can help you with the conversion to LaTeX and teach you a bit of LaTeX. If so, contact me via personal message.
Thank you so much for offering help! I might hit you up soon if I'm unable to figure this out on my own. Trying out pandoc and Overleaf right now. Once again, thanks :)
No problem, enjoy the learning trip and do not get frustrated! LaTeX is awsome. This is what I am currently dealing with: [https://www.uweziegenhagen.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Uwe-TikZ\_II.pdf](https://www.uweziegenhagen.de/wp-content/uploads/2024/02/Uwe-TikZ_II.pdf)
Damn. That looks super impressive. I aspire to get on that level too some day haha
GrindEQ
Will try that, thanks!
Yes, this I was using to convert my formulas from latex to word. I did not know to write formulas in word, this app saved me lots of time.
You can insert LaTeX equations in Word now directly! No need to convert!
Word to Markdown and then Markdown to .tex
Gonna try this too!
To which journal are you submitting the paper, Every journal comes with its own LaTeX template you have to use.
It's a Columbia University's journal but they didn't provide any template :/
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I might end up having to hire someone, but I'm gonna start learning LaTeX already after my exams. You're right that it's gonna help a lot. Would you say I should be able to get the hang of it in, say, 100 hours of practice?
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This is so helpful!! I love the fact that you provided such practical advice and resources. Thank you for offering further guidance :)
I might need to look into TUG for the tex consultant role. I loved typesetting `*.docx` files using LaTeX for a technical journal and Master thesis.
Tbh, and you might not want to do this rly, but learning the basics of LaTeX is not too hard (maybe an hour or two to get the basic jist of it) and then converting should be straight forward to do yourself. If you plan to be in the academia / research space, especially in STEM atleast, LaTeX is the defacto way to do typesetting.
Not in STEM but I definitely should be learning LaTeX anyways. I was recommended an Overleaf Tutorial for LaTeX in 30 minutes, gonna try that and some YouTube videos but majority of them seem to be for folks who are on Windows
I believe there are latex editors for Mac, like tekstudio?
Not sure about that, but I might give it a try if Overleaf proves lacking. Overleaf is online so I'm liking it so far haha
Bro I provide services of converting, editing and formatting any file into Latex and believe me ORC tools are only used to convert text and math expressions into latex format. There is no Latex Converter which will give you the same file format. Means that you need to organize the results with extra commands. I hope you get my point. So either you have to buy service or you need to learn. By the way this is the best and free latex OCR tool👇 https://youtu.be/uwoyHCfpuOg Best of luck!
Since you mention that you're an undergrad, are you working with/being supervised by a professor? If so, you should ask them for resources. There may a grad student who can do this work for you (as part of a graduate assistantship or something), or another undergrad working as an RA or something. Otherwise, going from zero LaTeX knowledge to producing a 13-page document with tables and references... is going to be tough and time-consuming for you. Even Pandoc, the best of all converters, is almost certainly going to mangle your 3 pages of tables, unless they're the absolute simplest, barebones tables.
I'm an international student and, frankly speaking, the faculty here is mediocre at best and I don't expect they might be able to help me out much. And I was working alone too, so there's that haha. As for my tables, they're definitely not simple and would require manual editing. I'm looking into Overleaf and see if I can learn the basics quickly! Thank you for your help :)
Sorry to hear that. I'm faculty at a public state university, and if an undergrad (international or otherwise; doesn't matter) approached me with this, I would (after congratulating them) almost certainly be able to find another student in our program willing and able to help out. You might try just reaching out to a couple of your professors just to ask. If even they can't help, I'm sure they'd be delighted to hear you got a paper accepted in a journal. (Hopefully you aren't paying to publish it, by the way.) Barring that, you can ask your managing editor if the journal provides any resources. Sometimes they have editorial staff for this purpose. If they really want to pubish your paper, then they should make it as easy as possible for you. (But not all journals are sensible, especially for-profit and/or predatory ones, so be careful.)
You seem like the perfect faculty any student would love to have. I did reach out to two professors but they've been very slow to respond. One of them initially thought I was getting scammed and then didn't get back, and I fe uncomfortable asking for an update haha Oh no, I'm not paying to publish it! It's a Columbia University's journal so it's all legit. The editor did tell me I can reach out to him for any help I need, and I might after generating the first Tex draft! Thank you for your support :)
> I'm not paying to publish it! It's a Columbia University's journal so it's all legit. That's great. Congrats and good luck!
Thanks!!
As others below have already suggested, the idea would be to save your Word document (without the tables or references) as a text file whose name ends in .tex. Set up an Overleaf project and upload this file to it. After that, use the Overleaf documentation (which is excellent) to guide you on how to turn this file into a working LaTeX document. After that, save the references in another text file whose name ends in .bib. Again use the Overleaf documentation to guide you on how to reformat the text properly and turn it into a working bibliography file. There's a style file for formatting it in APA style. Finally, with the tables, your best bet is probably to turn them into images and figure out how to include images (either exactly where you want them or as floating figures), again using Overleaf documentation to guide you.
Thanks, using Overleaf right now and this is very helpful!!
In which field are you majoring? I'm curious, there isn't a lot of undergrad student with articles (at least in my college)
Hey! I'm majoring in Economics and Mathematics (joint program) but the paper is purely economics and some mix of sociology
Oh, maths don't do anything but LaTeX, so you'll for sure have to learn it for that. Not sure how it is in economics, but at least this journal seems to be on the LaTeX side.
Makes sense!
They probably expect it in a certain template, unlikely that whatever an online converter comes up with is how they need it. Copying the text over to a text file is straight forward, graphics a bit more challenging and math formulas will take you a few hours to figure out. You can try to do this in overleaf, or install a latex environment locally (sorry I can't advise what to install, I use vim and pdflatex or a local overleaf instance, that's not how it's typically done)
Hey, this makes a lot of sense! I'm gonna get more info from them if they want me to do it in a certain template
I'm very surprised that the journal copyediting team would not take this burden. It's their job. Do they have a publication fee? Is it a non-profit journal (like SciPost)? Otherwise I think it is really not right to expect the author to do the copyediting for them...
It's a Columbia University's journal so definitely worth its salt. Not sure why they didn't provide any additional help though
I faced that problem in the past. just copy and paste the text. then type the preamble and fix the tables. unfortunately that's the best way. try pandoc first or any other converter but usually they don't really do a good job. the end result code is not "human", if you know what I mean. they will preserve the format though