Converting Word to LaTeX with Writer2LaTeX

LaTeX is great, but not everybody knows how to use it. So, what can you do if you get a .doc or a .docx-file, and need to transform it to LaTeX?

As far as I know, there is no direct way of conversion (though maybe pandoc could handle this). So, the best bet is to use LibreOffice Writer to open the file, and then use a converter.

There is a dedicated LibreOffice-Writer plugin to do Word->LaTeX conversion, which is called Writer2Latex (and which you can download at https://writer2latex.sourceforge.net/). It does a decent enough job for simple documents, but I discovered (too late) that there is one thing that can make your life much easier.

When using it, you really want to desactivate the Activate Multilingual Support option (or whatever it is called in English, in French it is Activer le support multilingue, and it is the first thing you can disactivate on the left, see screenshot below). It will pepper your document with useless \selectlanguage{english} commands in front of every paragraph. Unfortunately, it is activated by default, and you absolutely want to shut it down (especially if it is not you who has prepared the document).

If I had known that before, it would have saved me a few hours of my life.

For anything fancy, you will have to work by hand anyways (glossed linguistic examples, trees, etc.), but the nice thing is that Writer2Latex will transform elements it has difficulties with to images (and autoinclude them).