Re: [Groff] eqn plugin for MS Word??

[Frank Jahnke]

On Sat, 2007-08-11 at 08:13 -0400, Larry Kollar wrote:

> If the equations aren't changing a lot, you could try this:
> 
> eqn -> groff -> eps2eps
> 
> I do this with tables that I have to rotate for a large document,  
> adding a "psrotate" to the chain.

Too soon to tell how many there will be.  Probably only a dozen PDEs and
their solutions or so, and they may well change quite a bit during the
course of the editing.
> 
> Weird *should* handle EPS, although it might whine and give you grey  
> boxes on the screen, the print/PDF should turn out OK. 

That is exactly right.  I had to add the filter (Word does not install
the eps filter by default) and the screen shows only a blank space where
the equation is added.  It does print properly (but print preview still
shows a blank).

That does not seem to be a good course, since it will confuse my
co-author.

> If not (and  
> being Word, it wouldn't surprise me), try using pstoedit to convert  
> them to WMF. 

I've yet to try this, but a Word should "like" a native format.

> If all else fails, use Ghostscript to render the EPS  
> into TIFF or PNG (600 dpi should work pretty well for this).

Tiff and png don't give very good results.  pstoepsi works pretty well,
though.  The screen output is a tad clipped (for a test eqn anyway) but
the output is fine.  This may be a way to go.

The alternative, of course, is simply to do my end in groff and have him
work in Word (but that would undoubtedly give all sorts of font issues).
The journal does accept PDFs, and I can convert his portion to PDF and
do the joining and manipulation in Acrobat.  That too is a kludge, but
it may be easier than all of this futzing around.  I don't know yet.

What a pain.

Frank