Converting existing TeX documents

Converting TeX

To help you reuse your existing LaTeX documents and snippets in Word, Aurora includes a TeX interpreter with support for many common LaTeX commands. To convert a piece of TeX code, place it on the clipboard and use the “Paste from TeX” command to parse it.

Supported features

• Inline and display math, both numbered and unnumbered.
• Footnotes, block quotes, bulleted and numbered lists.
• Text accents, ligatures, and certain special symbols in text mode.
• \section, \subsection, and \subsubsection commands.
• Font appearance (\sl, \em, \bf, \it) and font size (\ssmall through \HUGE) modifiers.
• Alignment commands (\centering, \raggedleft, \raggedright) and environments (center, flushleft, flushright).
• tabular and tabular* environments with full support for \multicolumn, \hline, and \cline commands. Nested tables and all but @{...} and *{num}{cols} column specifiers are also supported.
• \caption within table and figure environments.
• Full syntax of \newcommand, \renewcommand, and \providecommand commands and partial support for \def.

Certain TeX peculiarities, such as < and > symbols becoming ¡ and ¿ in text mode, are also supported. Unrecognized environments are converted into Aurora objects to be processed by LaTeX itself.

Note: The TeX converter is still experimental and as such has a number of limitations, some of which will be addressed in future releases. The converter’s output will generally need some manual touching up to achieve the level of fidelity on par with the original document.

Limitations

• Labels and references are not currently converted.
• Theorem environments are not currently supported.
• Inserting graphics is not currently supported.
• Neither \verb command nor verbatim environment are currently supported. \tt is not supported either.
• Only equations defined in the environments align, equation, eqnarray, multline, gather, and flalign are numbered during conversion. Only a single number is generated, regardless of how many equations are given in the align and eqnarray environments. Environments themselves are transformed into their starred variants.
• The only additional information passed to LaTeX when processing math and unrecognized environments are the command definitions encountered during parsing. In particular, the \usepackage directives are neither parsed nor given to LaTeX. To work around that, specify the preamble information in the “Packages” section of the formula properties dialog ahead of time.
• Defining custom environments is not supported.
• Nested lists and bullet specifications are not converted.
• Low-level TeX commands are not supported. Rudimentary support for \def exists, but context-sensitive matching is not implemented.
• Inline tables, while allowed in LaTeX, are not supported in Word.