Converting Latex To Docx With Pandoc
This is a little bloglet about converting LaTeX documents to docx, which I don’t do often enough to remember how to do it. Many of us will have that one collaborator that will always reply back and ask for a manuscript draft in a Word format. Most of my colleagues nowadays are happy with LaTeX, but there’s almost always one!
Pandoc makes it super easy to convert a LaTeX source file to docx format, and can be persuaded to include references, most internal cross references, figures, tables etc. This blog from Zhelin Chan got me most of the way there, but there are a few extra steps I needed to get everything working.
Firstly, I needed to install Pandoc. I’m using a Mac these days so homebrew made installation straightforward. You also need an extension to Pandoc called pandoc-crossref
brew install pandoc pandoc-crossref
With these applications installed, the command to convert from file.tex to file.docx is
pandoc --filter pandoc-crossref --citeproc file.tex --bibliography=references.bib --csl=vancouver.csl -o file.docx
I’ve also pointed the application at vacouver.csl to format the references in the Vancouver style.