Wednesday, December 4, 2013

From Latex to DOCX

Latex is awesome!  I just thought I needed to say it straight up...seriously, I made the switch from Microsoft Word years ago and never looked back.

Having said that, Microsoft Word has its benefits.

Sometimes you find yourself wanting to convert you tex file into docx or any other format. This is not a trivial task. You can copy & paste or use online services but I always wanted to have a tool to do it on my computer.

I recently came across this nifty tool, pandoc, a universal document converter:

"If you need to convert files from one markup format into another, pandoc is your swiss-army knife. Pandoc can convert documents in markdown, reStructuredText, textile, HTML, DocBook, LaTeX, MediaWiki markup, OPML, or Haddock markup to

It works great. I was able to convert from Latex to Word and get very decent results. It was able to port citation, figures and even mathematical equations!

I did have a problem setting it up to support new packages. In particular, it wouldn't detect my acronyms \ac{BLAH}.

I used sed utility to remove them. I know it's not ideal, but it worked for me.

I would like to thank John MacFarlane for creating such a great tool!

Let me know about your experieneces with the tool or maybe you can help me figure out how to make it support additional latex packages :)

Enjoy!

Thursday, October 3, 2013

10 Tips...for new PhD students..


1. Small incremental goals (milestones)...

2. Take breaks...

3. Collaborate, work in a group...

4. Write, take notes, comments, blog, tweet...


6. Measure your progress...

7. Know yourself...

8. Use tools to manage bibliography...

9. Peer-review your work

10. Listen to senior PhD students :P