Program idea: TeX Converter

Need:

Many, many professionals and graduate students in the mathematical sciences use the TeX macro language to produce research papers, lecture notes, and theses. TeX has become a standard format for academic journals, who often promise a quicker time from submission to publication if the article is written in TeX. However, TeX is cumbersome to use because it is a compiled language. Rather than editing the document in a WYSIWYG manner, you have to edit a source file and recompile it to see how it looks.

If only there was a program that converts a standard Microsoft Word document (or RTF) into TeX! Then scientists could write their papers in a standard word processor, and simply convert it to TeX before publication.

Such a TeX converter would need to have the following features:

• It should provide many formatting options, since each journal or publisher usually has their own guidelines on formatting.
• It should be able to convert documents using any one of the standard macro libraries LaTeX, LaTeX 2e, AMS-LaTeX, and AMS-TeX. Again, publishers usually specify which one of these you should use.
• TeX uses two different types of italic font: one for mathematical variables, and one for emphasized text. Microsoft Word uses the same font for both, so the converter will somehow have to determine which italic font to use.

Solution:

This program would probably be in the form of a drag and drop utility: drag your Word file onto the program icon and a TeX version of it will be saved.

It would have the following features, which accommodate the above needs:

• Unlike other converters, this one would be interactive. Before the conversion commences, a dialog would appear which allows you to select your formatting options.
• For ease of use, you would be able to save settings for every journal that you publish in, so that you don't have to remember each publisher's requirements.
• While converting the file, there may be a few spots where the file is ambiguous, ie the converter cannot determine which type of italic font it should use. At spots like this, the converter would stop, and ask you which format to use (much like a spelling checker stops at each unrecognized word).

Just getting TeX to mimic Microsoft's format is not enough, since publishers may need to change the parameters (the page size, for instance). What sets this program apart from other converters is interactivity. This enables it to produce quality TeX code that conforms to publishers specifications.