Rich Text to LaTeX Converter

How to Use the Rich Text to LaTeX Converter

1. 1. Paste. Click the dashed box and paste with Ctrl+V or ⌘V. The box does not show your text; it reads the formatting the clipboard carries and converts it. If you have HTML source or plain text instead, use the text box below it — plain text becomes paragraphs, and lines starting - or 1. become lists.
2. 2. Choose the structure. Decide whether Heading 1 becomes \section (articles) or \chapter (books and reports), whether headings are numbered, and how tables are ruled. Booktabs is the default because most journals prefer it.
3. 3. Copy the LaTeX. The output is the body of your document. Paste it between \begin{document} and \end{document}, or tick Wrap in a complete document to get a file that compiles on its own.
4. 4. Add the packages. The preamble box lists only the \usepackage lines this text needs — hyperref for links, booktabs for table rules, ulem for struck-through text.
5. 5. Read the checks. Anything LaTeX cannot take from a paste — images, merged table rows, characters outside the Latin alphabet — is listed under the output.

What Becomes What

Which Characters Get Escaped

Ten characters mean something to LaTeX, so they cannot be typed as themselves. The converter puts a backslash in front of &, %, $, #, _, { and }, and writes the tilde, caret and backslash as \textasciitilde{}, \textasciicircum{} and \textbackslash{} — a backslash followed by a tilde or caret is an accent command, and two backslashes in a row are a line break, not the characters. Three more are rewritten for safety: in LaTeX's original OT1 font encoding, <, > and | print as ¡, ¿ and an em dash, so they become \textless{}, \textgreater{} and \textbar{}.

Non-breaking spaces become the tie ~, so “Fig. 3” stays on one line. Soft hyphens become \-, thin spaces become \,, and zero-width characters — which Word and the web both scatter through pasted text — are removed.

Quotes, Dashes and Accents

Modern LaTeX reads UTF-8 by default, so curly quotes, en and em dashes, ellipses and accented letters such as é can stay exactly as pasted. If your template or journal wants the classic TeX forms, switch the option to ligatures: “ and ” become `` and '', – and — become -- and ---, and … becomes \ldots{}. Straight double quotes are fixed either way, because a typed " prints as a closing quote in LaTeX even where it should open one.

Worked Example

Load the example converts a short note — a heading, a paragraph with bold, italic and a link, a two-item list and a captioned table. The paragraph comes out as Results were \textbf{significant} (p \textless{} .05) for \textit{both} groups — see \href{https://doi.org/10.1000/182}{the paper}. Costs: \$5 \& 10\% tax. and the table as a table float holding a booktabs tabular{lr}, with the numbers right-aligned automatically. The preamble box asks for booktabs and hyperref.

Limits Worth Knowing

• Footnotes and endnotes arrive as superscript numbers and a list at the end; rebuild them with \footnote{}.
• Merged rows (rowspan) keep their text in the first row; the multirow package can span them by hand.
• Long text in a table cell stays on one line in an l column. Change the column to p{4cm} for wrapping.
• Lists inside table cells are flattened to bullets in running text, because itemize needs a paragraph column.
• Lists nested more than four deep are reported: LaTeX itself refuses them.
• This converts formatting, not meaning — check the result against your template or class file before you submit.

Frequently Asked Questions

How do I convert a Word document to LaTeX?

For a short passage, copy it in Word and paste it into the box above; for a whole manuscript, the same works in pieces. Fix the headings in Word first — real Heading styles become \section commands, but bold body text that merely looks like a heading does not. Pandoc converts a whole .docx file from the command line if you need that, but a paste is quicker for a section or a table.

Does this send my text anywhere?

No. The conversion runs in your browser, and nothing you paste is uploaded, stored or sent to CitationEasy. The pasted markup is parsed into a tree and written out as LaTeX text; it is never inserted into the page, so scripts or event handlers inside a paste cannot run.

Why do I need to escape characters like % and & in LaTeX?

Because they are commands. % starts a comment that swallows the rest of the line, & separates table cells, # marks macro parameters, $ starts maths, _ and ^ set sub- and superscripts, and braces group text. Typed raw, each either breaks the compile or silently deletes text. The converter escapes them all for you.

Why does my pasted link not work in the PDF?

Links need the hyperref package. Copy the preamble lines from the box under the output into your preamble. Hyperref is loaded last because it redefines other packages' commands.

Can I paste from Google Docs and keep the bold and italics?

Yes. Google Docs wraps its clipboard in a bold tag set to normal weight and puts styling on spans; the converter reads the real font weight and style, so only text that is actually bold or italic is marked. Underline on links is ignored, because hyperref already colours or boxes them.

Is \textsubscript available in every LaTeX?

In any distribution from 2015 onward, where it became part of the LaTeX kernel. On an older installation, load the subscript package.

What if I just want to convert a table?

Paste the table here and it comes out as tabular, or use the LaTeX Table Generator when your data is CSV or a spreadsheet range and you want control over alignment, captions and notes.