Paste from Word, Google Docs or Wikipedia and get clean LaTeX

Your co-author sends their section as a Word file. It has bold terms, a bulleted list, a couple of equations made with Word's equation editor, and quotation marks in every possible style. In most LaTeX editors, pasting it gives you plain text at best, and at worst a compile error about a Unicode character you can't even see.

In Luzbase, you paste it and get LaTeX.

What gets converted

Paste from Google Docs, Word, Notion or a web page, and the formatting comes across as LaTeX:

• Bold and italic become \textbf{} and \textit{}
• Bulleted and numbered lists become itemize and enumerate
• Headings become sections and subsections
• Tables become tabular
• Links become \href{}{}
• Dashes and ellipses become --, --- and \ldots{}
• Curly "smart quotes" become proper LaTeX quotes (``like this'')

Equations too

The part people don't expect: math comes across as math.

• Word equations turn into LaTeX math instead of an image or a row of question marks.
• Rendered math on the web, the kind you see on Wikipedia, Math StackExchange or any site that uses KaTeX or MathJax, pastes as its LaTeX source.

Copy Bayes' theorem from Wikipedia and you get

P(A \mid B) = \frac{P(B \mid A)\,P(A)}{P(B)}

rather than P(A∣B)=P(B∣A)P(A)P(B).

Where it helps most

• Merging a co-author's draft. The section written in Word no longer needs retyping.
• Moving old work into LaTeX. A thesis chapter written in Google Docs can come across a section at a time.
• Quoting standard results. Grab a well-known formula from a reference page without transcribing it.
• Notes from Notion. If you plan in Notion and write in LaTeX, the outline moves across with its structure.

A quick check after pasting

Smart paste gets you most of the way, but read what you pasted before you compile:

• Look at special characters. Accents pasted from PDFs are sometimes stored as two characters, a letter plus a separate accent mark. If the compile complains, the error explanation tells you to retype that letter.
• Check long tables. Complex merged cells in Word don't always map one-to-one to LaTeX. Visual mode makes these easy to tidy.
• Add labels. Pasted equations don't come with \label{}. Add one if you plan to reference them.

Try it

Open a project, copy a paragraph with some formatting from anywhere, and paste. Then switch to Visual mode to see it the way it'll print.

Start writing free.