PageMaker to LaTeX conversion

Pmtolatex is a little weekend hack I did for converting Adobe PageMaker documents to LaTeX. The results will certainly need retouching by hand, but far less than if you simply converted your PageMaker file to plain text and did the rest by hand. The program tries to do a good job on equations, and will even attempt to set up LaTeX equation and align environments in appropriate places. However, it doesn't use any nontextual information from the input file, so, for instance, if you've done some of your equations using an external equation editor and pasted them in as graphics, you'll have to redo them. Some of its rules for conversion are set up to recognize the way I habitually do things in PageMaker, so your mileage may vary; if you know a little about Unix-style regular expressions, you can always modify the program to suit yourself.

Legal

Pmtolatex is copyright (c) 2001 Benjamin Crowell, and is subject to the GPL license. It's free software. If you don't agree to the GPL license, you don't have permission to download and use the software.

Installation

Download

The program is implemented as a Perl script. The Perl language is free, so you shouldn't have any trouble finding a copy and installing it on your system. Open your PM file, do Edit Story, and File>Export>Text. Select "Tagged Text" for the format. If you're running Unix, you use the following command to run the program:

    pmtolatex <myfile.tag >myfile.tex