[First] [Previous] [Next] [Last] [Contents]

# 3 Using Writer2LaTeX and Writer2BibTeX

Writer2LaTeX is quite flexible: It can take advantage of several LaTeX packages, such as hyperref, pifont, ulem. It can create customized LaTeX code based on the styles and text in the document. Also it supports 25 different languages, latin, greek and cyrillic scripts and 8 inputencodings.

The flexibility makes it possible to use Writer2LaTeX from several philosophies:

- You can use LaTeX as a typesetting engine for your OOo documents: Writer2LaTeX can be configured to create a LaTeX document with as much formatting as possible preserved. Note that the resulting LaTeX source will be readable, but not very clean.

  Be aware that even though Writer2LaTeX tries hard to cope with any document, you will only get good results for well structured documents, ie. documents that are formatted using styles.

- If you need to continue the work on your document in LaTeX your primary interest may be the content rather than the formatting. Writer2LaTeX can be configured to produce a LaTeX document which strips most of the formatting and hence produces a clean LaTeX source from any source document.

- If you don't like to write LaTeX code by hand, you may use OOo as a simple graphical front-end for LaTeX. Using a special OOo Writer template and a special configuration file for Writer2LaTeX, you can create well-structured LaTeX documents that resembles “hand-written” LaTeX documents. You can compare this to the way LyX works.

  Writer2LaTeX does not provide an input filter for LaTeX. It is recommended to use Eitan M. Gurari's TeX4ht to convert LaTeX documents into OOo Writer format. Roundtrip editing OOo Writer ↔ LaTeX is not possible in general, but Writer2LaTeX+TeX4ht does provide some rudimentary support for this, see section 3.6.

## 3.1 The LaTeX package ooomath.sty

OOo Math has a few features that are not available in standard LaTeX packages. Hence Writer2LaTeX uses an optional package ooomath.sty 2 which implements these constructions. This packages is only needed for documents containing formulas. If it is not available, Writer2LaTeX will insert the necessary definitions in the LaTeX preamble.

It is sufficient to place ooomath.sty in the same directory as the converted LaTeX document. It will however be more convenient if you install it in your TeX distribution. The proper place will usually be the “local texmf tree”, please see the documentation of your TeX distribution. Below are specific instructions for teTeX and MikTeX:

### Instructions for teTeX (unix)

If you use teTeX you can install ooomath.sty as follows:

Open a shell and type

texconfig conf

This will list the configuration details for teTeX. Under the heading “Kpathsea” you will see a list of directories searched by TeX. You can put ooomath.sty in the subdirectory tex of any of these directories. Usually the directory

/home/<user name>/texmf/tex

can be used (you can create it if it doesn't exist).

Next you should type

texconfig rehash

to make teTeX refresh it's filename database.

### Instructions for MikTeX (Windows)

If you use MikTeX you can install ooomath.sty as follows:

Copy ooomath.sty to the tex subdirectory in the local texmf tree. With a standard installation this will be the directory

c:\localtexmf\tex

If this directory does not exist you should start “MikTeX Options” (you can find this in the Start Menu). On the tab page Roots you can see the location of the local texmf tree.

If the subdirectory tex does not exist, you can create it.

Next you should start “MikTeX Options”. On the tab page General, click the button Refresh Now to make MikTeX refresh it's filename database.

## 3.2 Converting to LaTeX from the command line

To convert a file to LaTeX use the command line

w2l [-latex] [-config <configfile>] [options] <document to convert> [<output path and/or file name>]

The parts in square brackets are optional.

This will produce a LaTeX file with the specified name. If no output file is specified, Writer2LaTeX will use the same name as the original document, but change the extension to .tex.

Examples:

w2l mydocument.sxw mypath/myoutputdocument.tex

or

w2l -config clean.xml mydocument.sxw

If you specify the -config option, Writer2LaTeX will load this configuration file before converting your document. You can read more about configuration in section 3.5. You can also specify any simple option described in this section directly on the command line, eg. to produce a file suitable for processing with pdfLaTeX:

w2l -backend pdftex mydocument.sxw

The script w2l also provides a shorthand notation to use the sample configuration files included in writer2latex05.zip. The command line is

w2l [-ultraclean|-clean|-pdfscreen|-pdfprint|-article] <writer document to convert> [<output path and/or file name>]

For example to produce a clean LaTeX file (ie. ignoring most of the formatting from the source document):

w2l -clean mydocument.sxw

It is recommended that you create your own scripts to support your own configuration file(s).

## 3.3 Converting to BibTeX from the command line

Writer2BibTeX extracts bibliography data to a BibTeX file. To do this use the commandline

w2l -bibtex <writer document to convert> [<output path and/or file name>]

You can also extract the data as part of the conversion to LaTeX, see section 3.5.

## 3.4 Using Writer2LaTeX and Writer2BibTeX as export filters

If you choose File – Export in Writer you should be able to choose LaTeX 2e, BibTeX as file type.

Note: You have to use the export menu because there is no import filter for LaTeX/BibTeX. You should always save in the native format of OOo as well!

## 3.5 Configuration

LaTeX export can be configured with a configuration file. Where the configuration is read from depends on how you use Writer2LaTeX:

If you use Writer2LaTeX as an export filter in OOo, the configuration is handled as follows:

- The file writer2latex.xml is read from the user installation directory of OOo

  On linux/unix usually something like <home directory>/.OpenOffice.org2/user

  On windows usually something like <user profile>\OpenOffice.org2\user

  If the file does not exist, it will be created automatically.

If, on the other hand, you use Writer2LaTeX from the command line, you will have to specify on the command line which configuration file to use.

The configuration is a file in xml format. Here is a sample configuration file for producing a document of class book, converting only basic formatting and optimizing for pdfTeX.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8" ?>

<config>

<option name="backend" value="pdftex" />

<option name="documentclass" value="book" />

<option name="inputencoding" value="latin1" />

<option name="use_pifont" value="false" />

<option name="use_bibtex" value="false" />

<option name="bibtex_style" value="plain" />

<option name="formatting" value="convert_basic" />

<option name="page_formatting" value="convert_all" />

<option name="debug" value="false" />

<heading-map max-level="6">

<heading-level-map writer-level="1" name="chapter" level="0" />

<heading-level-map writer-level="2" name="section" level="1" />

<heading-level-map writer-level="3" name="subsection"

level="2" />

<heading-level-map writer-level="4" name="subsubsection"

level="3" />

<heading-level-map writer-level="5" name="paragraph"

level="4" />

<heading-level-map writer-level="6" name="subparagraph"

level="5" />

</heading-map>

<custom-preamble />

<style-map name="Quotations" class="paragraph"

before="\begin{quote}" after=\end{quote} />

<string-replace input="LaTeX" latex-code="{\LaTeX}" />

</config>

The meaning of each part is explained in the following sections. Writer2LaTeX comes with five sample configuration files:

- ultraclean.xml to produce a clean LaTeX file, ie. almost all the formatting is ignored.

- clean.xml is a less radical version; preserves hyperlinks, color and most character formatting.

- pdfscreen.xml to produce a LaTeX file which is optimized for screen viewing using the package pdfscreen.sty.

- pdfprint.xml to produce a LaTeX file which is optimized for printing with pdfTeX.

- article.xml to produce a LaTeX article, see section 3.6.

### Basic options

- The option backend can have any of the values generic, dvips, pdftex (default) and unspecified. This will create LaTeX files suitable for any backend/dvi driver, dvips or pdfTeX respectively. The last value does not assume any specific backend. This option affects export of graphics: Only file types than can be handled by the backend are included; other types will be commented out. If you use unspecified, no graphics will be commented out.

- If the option no_preamble is set to false, Writer2LaTeX will not create the a LaTeX preamble, nor include \begin{document} and \end{document}. This is useful if the document is to be included in another LaTeX document. Note that in this case you will have to make sure that all packages/definitions needed are available in the master LaTeX document.

- The option inputencoding can have any of the values ascii (default), latin1, latin2, iso-8859-7, cp1250, cp1251, koi8-r or utf8. The latter requires Dominique Unruh's ucs.sty.

- If the option multilingual is set to false, Writer2LaTeX will assume that the document is written in one language only – otherwise all the language information contained in the document will be used.

- The option split_linked_sections specifies that a linked section should be exported to a separate LaTeX-file. Default is false.

- The option split_toplevel_section specifies that all sections should be exported to a separate LaTeX-file, excluding nested sections. Default is false.

- The option wrap_lines_after specifies that Writer2LaTeX should try to break lines in the LaTeX source as soon as possible after this number of characters. Default is 72. If you use a text editor which supports wrapping of long lines, you may want to set this option to 0; in this case Writer2LaTeX will not wrap lines.

### Options for document structure

- The option documentclass is the name of the documentclass to use (default is article).

- The option global_options is a list of global options to add to the documentclass (the default value is an empty string).

- The heading_map section specifies how headings in OOo should map to LaTeX. Eg. the first line in the sample above specifies that the toplevel heading (Heading 1) should map to \chapter, which is of level 0 in LaTeX. Up to 10 levels are supported (the same number as in OOo).

### Table options

- The option use_longtable is used to specify that longtable.sty should be used to export tables which may break across pages. Default is false.

- The option use_supertabular is used to specify that supertabular.sty should be used to export tables which may break across pages. Default is true. (You should only set one of the options use_longtable and use_supertabular to true).

- The option use_tabulary is used to specify that tabulary.sty should be used to export tables. Default is false.

- The option simple_table_limit can be set to any non-negative integer (default is 0). Table cells in OOo can contain any number of paragraphs, so normally Writer2LaTeX exports tables with p columns. For simple tables where all cells only contains a single line it is better to use l, c and r columns. If all cells in a table contains at most one paragraph, and all these paragraphs contains less than this number of characters, the table will be exported with l, c and r columns. This option has no effect on tables using tabulary.

- The option use_colortbl is used, if you want to apply background color to tables using the package colortbl.sty. The value can be true or false (default). This option has no effect unless you also set the option use_color to true.

- The option float_tables can be used to specify that you want to include graphics and text boxes in a table environment. Default is false.

- The option float_options can be used to give placement options to the figure floats, eg. h for here. Default is empty (default placement).

- The option table_sequence_name can be set to a sequence name in the source document. OpenDocument has a very weak sense of table captions: A table caption is a paragraph containing a sequence number. If you use OOo's defaults, Writer2LaTeX can guess which sequence name to use. If it fails, you can give the name in this option (default is empty).

- The option use_caption can be used if you want to take advantage of the LaTeX package caption.sty. Currently Writer2LaTeX only uses the support for non-floating captions from this package.

### Graphics options

- The option float_figures can be used to specify that you want to include graphics and text boxes in a figure environment. Default is false.

- The option float_options can be used to give placement options to the figure floats, eg. h for here. Default is empty (default placement).

- The option figure_sequence_name can be set to a sequence name in the source document. OpenDocument has a very weak sense of figure captions: A figure caption is a paragraph containing a sequence number. If you use OOo's defaults, Writer2LaTeX can guess which sequence name to use. If it fails, you can give the name in this option (default is empty).

- The option use_caption can be used if you want to take advantage of the LaTeX package caption.sty. Currently Writer2LaTeX only uses the support for non-floating captions from this package.

- The option align_frames can be used to specify, that all graphics and text boxes should be included in a center environment. If you don't want that, set this option to false. Default is true.

- The option keep_image_size can be used to specify that the size of images should not be exported, hence LaTeX should use the original size of the image. Default is false.

- The option image_options can be used to specify some options that should be applied to all images (ie. all \includegraphics commands). For example "width=\linewidth". Default is empty (no options).

- The option remove_graphics_extension can be used to specify, that the file extension on graphics files should be removed. You will thus get eg. \includegraphics{myimage} rather than \includegraphics{myimage.png}. This can be handy if you use an external tool to convert the graphics files (you should set the option backend to unspecified in this case).

### Font and symbol options

- The option greek_math can have the values true (default) or false. This means that greek letters in latin or cyrillic text are rendered in math mode. This behaviour assumes that greek letters are used as symbols in this context, and has the advantage that greek text fonts are not required. It is not used in greek text, where it would be awful.

- The option use_ooomath can have the values true or false (default). This enables the use of the LaTeX package ooomath.sty. If this package is not used, the necessary definitions will be included in the LaTeX preamble, which may become quite long – so using ooomath.sty is recommended.

- The option use_pifont can have the values true or false (default). This enables the use of Zapf Dingbats using the LaTeX package pifont.sty.

- The option use_wasysym can have the values true or false (default). This enables the use of the wasy symbol font using the LaTeX package wasysym.sty.

- The option use_ifsym can have the values true or false (default). This enables the use of the ifsym symbol font using the LaTeX package ifsym.sty.

- The option use_bbding can have the values true or false (default). This enables the use of the bbding symbol font (a clone of Zapf Dingbats) using the LaTeX package bbding.sty.

- The option use_eurosym can have the values true or false (default). This enables the use of the eurosym symbol font using the LaTeX package eurosym.sty.

- The option use_tipa can have the values true or false (default). This enables the use of phonetic symbols using the LaTeX package tipa.sty.

### Options for various packages

- The option use_hyperref can have the values true (default) or false. This enables use of the package hyperref.sty to include hyperlinks in the LaTeX document.

- The option use_color can have the values true (default) or false. This enables use of the package hyperref.sty to apply color in the LaTeX document.

- The option use_endnotes can have the values true or false (default). This enables use of the package endnotes.sty to include endnotes in the LaTeX document. If set to false, endnotes will be converted to footnotes.

- The option use_ulem can have the values true or false (default). This enables use of the package ulem.sty to support underlining and crossing out in the LaTeX document.

- The option use_lastpage can have the values true or false (default). This enables use of the package lastpage.sty to represent the page count.

### Various options

- The option notes can have any of the values comment (default), ignore, marginpar, pdfannotation. This specifies what to do with notes (annotations) in the document: They can be ignored, converted to LaTeX comments, converted to \marginpar or converted to pdf annotations (which will default to \marginpar if the document is not processed with pdfLaTeX).

  In addition, you can give any LaTeX command (inluding the backslash), and the notes will be exported as \yourcommand{the note}.

- The option tabstop is used to specify what to do with tabulator stops in the document. Normally these are converted to spaces, but with this option you can specify any LaTeX code, that should be used instead. For example "\quad", "\hspace{2em}"

### Options for BibTeX

- The option use_bibtex can have the values true or false (default). This enables the use of BibTeX for bibliography generation. If it is set to false, the bibliography is included as text.

- The option bibtex_style can have any BibTeX style as value (default is plain). This is the BibTeX style to be used in the LaTeX document.

### Options to control export of page formatting

- The option page_formatting can have any of the values ignore_all, convert_header_footer, convert_all. This will ignore all page formatting, convert the header and footer (using custom page styles) or convert all supported formatting, including page geometry and footnote rule.

- The option use_geometry specifies that the package geometry.sty should be used to export the geometry of the page (page size, margins etc.). Default is false, which will export the geometry using the low level LaTeX commands.

- The option use_fancyhdr specifies that the package fancyhdr.sty should be used to export the header and footer of the page. Default is false, which will export the header and footer using the low level LaTeX page style commands.

### Options to control export of other formatting

In Writer, formatting is controlled by styles. You can control how much formatting is exported using the following options3. Note that these options has a major impact on the structure of the LaTeX document created.

- The option formatting can have any of these values:

  - ignore_all will instruct Writer2LaTeX to ignore all character, paragraph, heading, list and footnote formatting contained in the document.

  - ignore_most will preserve basic character formatting.

  - convert_basic (default) will preserve basic character formatting as well as all numberings (lists, headings, footnotes).

  - convert_most will convert all supported formatting, except that paragraph formatting and font size is only converted if it is set by a style. To be able to preserve formatting, an environment is created for all paragraph styles, custom lists is used for listings, headings are reformatted using the \@startsection command etc.

  - convert_all will preserve all supported formatting.

- The option ignore_empty_paragraphs can have the values true (default) or false. Setting the option to true will instruct Writer2LaTeX to ignore empty paragraphs; otherwise they are converted to \bigskip.

- The option ignore_double_spaces can have the values true (default) or false. Setting the option to true will instruct Writer2LaTeX to ignore double spaces, otherwise they are converted to (\ ).

- The option ignore_hard_page_breaks can have the values true or false (default). Setting the option to true will instruct Writer2LaTeX to ignore hard page breaks (but not soft page breaks specified in paragraph styles).

- The option ignore_hard_line_breaks can have the values true or false (default). Setting the option to true will instruct Writer2LaTeX to ignore hard line breaks (shift-Enter).

### Options for strict handling of content

The following options can be used if you want a very strict control with the content allowed in the document. The options

- other_styles

- image_content

- table_content

Can all have the values accept (default), ignore, warning and error.

This controls how various content should be handled by Writer2LaTeX. The option other_styles controls paragraph and text content, for which there is no style map (see below). The other options control images and tables.

If the value of this option is accept, the content is handled as normal. If the value is ignore, the content is ignored silently. The values warning and error issues a message on the terminal resp. in the generated LaTeX code.

### Style maps

In addition you can specify maps from styles in Writer to your own LaTeX styles in the configuration. Currently this is possible for text styles, paragraph styles and list styles. The following examples are from the sample configuration file article.xml.

This is a simple rule, that maps text formatted with the text style Emphasis to the LaTeX code \emph{...}:

<style-map name="Emphasis" class="text" before="\emph{" after="}" />

This is another simple rule, that maps paragraphs formatted with the paragraph style part to the LaTeX code \part{...}. The attribute line-break ensures that no line breaks are inserted between the code and the text.

<style-map name="part" class="paragraph" before="\part{" after="}" line-break="false" />

This is a rule, that maps paragraph formatted with style Preformatted Text to the LaTeX environment verbatim. The attribute verbatim ensures that the content of the paragraph is exported verbatim (this implies that characters not available in the inputenc are converted to question marks and that other content is discarded, eg. footnotes). The paragraph-block entry specifies code to go before and after an entire block of paragraphs. The name attribute specifies the style of the first paragraph; the next attribute specifies the style(s) of subsequent paragraphs in the block.

<style-map name="Preformatted Text" class="paragraph-block" next="Preformatted Text" before="\begin{verbatim}" after="\end{verbatim}" />

<style-map name="Preformatted Text" class="paragraph" before="" after="" verbatim="true" />

This is a more elaborate set of rules, that maps paragraphs formatted with styles Title, author and date (in any order) to \maketitle in LaTeX.

<style-map name="Title" class="paragraph" before="\title{" after="}" line-break="false" />
<style-map name="author" class="paragraph" before="\author{" after="}" line-break="false" />
<style-map name="date" class="paragraph" before="\date{" after="}" line-break="false" />
<style-map name="Title" class="paragraph-block" next="author;date" before="" after="\maketitle" />
<style-map name="author" class="paragraph-block" next="Title;date" before="" after="\maketitle" />
<style-map name="date" class="paragraph-block" next="Title;author" before="" after="\maketitle" />

This will produce code like this:

\title{Configuration}

\author{Henrik Just}

\date{2006}

\maketitle

The last example maps a paragraph formatted with the theorem list style to a LaTeX environment named theorem. Note that there are two entries for a list style: The first one to specify the LaTeX code to put before and after the entire list. The second one to specify the LaTeX code to put before and after each list item.

<style-map name="theorem" class="paragraph" before="" after="" />
<style-map name="theorem" class="list" before="" after="" />
<style-map name="theorem" class="listitem" before="\begin{theorem}" after="\end{theorem}" />

When you override a style, all formatting specified in the original document will be igored.

### String replace

Often LaTeX requires special care to typeset certain constructions. For example according to german typografical rules, an abbreviation like z.B. should be typeset with a small space before the B. You can specify this in the configuration:

<string-replace input="z.B." latex-code="z.\,B." />

The input is the text in the OOo document, the latex-code is the LaTeX code to export for this text.

### Math symbols

In OOo Math you can add user-defined symbols. Writer2LaTeX already understands the predefined symbols such as %alpha. If you define your own symbols, you can add an entry in the configuration that specifies LaTeX code to use. The math-symbol-map element is used for this:

<math-symbol-map name=”ddarrow” latex=”\Downarrow” />

This example will map the symbol %ddarrow to the LaTeX code \Downarrow.

### Custom preamble

The text you specify in the element custom-preamble will be copied verbatim into the LaTeX preamble. For example:

<custom-preamble>\usepackage{palatino}</custom-preamble>

to typeset your document using the postscript font palatino.

## 3.6 Using OpenOffice.org as a frontend for LaTeX

Writer2LaTeX has some simple support for using OOo as a frontend for LaTeX. The long term goal of this is to turn Writer into a near-wysiwyg LaTeX editor somewhat like LyX.

Here is a short description:

Create a new document based on the template LaTeX-article.stw.

This template contains a number of styles that corresponds to LaTeX code:

OOo Writer style | OOo Writer class | LaTeX code
Title 4 | paragraph | \title{...} 5
author | paragraph | \author{...}
date | paragraph | \date{...}
abstract title | paragraph | renews \abstractname
abstract | paragraph | abstract environment
part | paragraph | \part{...}
Heading 2 | paragraph | \section{...}
Heading 3 | paragraph | \subsection{...}
Heading 4 | paragraph | \subsubsection{...}
Heading 5 | paragraph | \paragraph{...}
Heading 6 | paragraph | \subparagraph{...}
flushleft | paragraph | flushleft environment
flushright | paragraph | flushright environment
center | paragraph | center environment
verse | paragraph | verse environment
quote | paragraph | quote environment
quotation | paragraph | quotation environment
Preformatted text | paragraph | verbatim environment6
theorem | paragraph | theorem environment
itemize | paragraph | itemize list
enumerate | paragraph | enurerate list
List Heading | paragraph | description list (item label)
List Contents | paragraph | description list (item text)
verb | text | \verb|...|
Emphasis | text | \emph{...}
Strong Emphasis | text | \textbf{...}
textrm | text | \textrm{...}
textsf | text | \textsf{...}
texttt | text | \texttt{...}
textup | text | \textup{...}
textsl | text | \textsl{...}
textit | text | \textit{...}
textsc | text | \textsc{...}
textmd | text | \textmd{...}
textbf | text | \textbf{...}
tiny | text | {\tiny ...}
scriptsize | text | {\sciptsize ...}
footnotesize | text | {\footnotesize ...}
small | text | {\small ...}
normalsize | text | {\normalsize ...}
large | text | {\large ...}
Large | text | {\Large ...}
LARGE | text | {\LARGE ...}
huge | text | {\huge ...}
Huge | text | {\Huge ...}

If you use these styles and uses the configuration file article.xml when you convert your document with Writer2LaTeX, you will get a result that resembles a handwritten LaTeX file. Note that hard formatting and any other styles will be ignored.

### Roundtrip editing

Writer2LaTeX does not provide a filter, that converts LaTeX files back into OOo Writer format. This is however possible with Eitan M. Gurari's TeX4ht system (http://www.cse.ohio-state.edu/~gurari/TeX4ht/mn.html). If you use Writer2LaTeX (with article.xml) together with TeX4ht's OOo mode (oolatex), simple roundtrip edition LaTeX ↔ OOo Writer is supported. Beware of information loss if you do this – do not use this roundtrip for existing LaTeX or Writer documents!

As a genereal rule, you should save your document in the native OOo Writer format and convert to LaTeX when you are finished (or want to see the result).

2 This pakcage replaces writer.sty used by older versions of Writer2LaTeX.

3 Note that these options have changed a lot since version 0.3.2.

4 The use of italics in this table indicates styles that are predefined in OOo. The names of these styles will be localized if you use a non-english version of OOo.

5 Also \maketitle is added at the end of a sequence of Title, author and date.

6 Only characters available in the inputenc are accepted. Other characters are converted to question marks and other content is discarded, eg. footnotes.