Ever seen those sweet research papers with that awesome font? That’s LaTeX. If you are a die-hard LaTeX fan you can pretty much stop reading this post right now. For the rest of us, Microsoft Word 2007 is often a practical alternative when pressed for time.
I’ll be the first to admit that if you can be bothered getting your hands dirty, LaTeX makes documents look pretty damn sweet. But there are times when the fuss of setting up distros and then beating LaTeX into submission just isn’t worth it (positioning figures, anyone?). If you just need to throw a quick document together, but want people to think you’re a LaTeX pro, you can get passable results using Word 2007 with a few tweaks:
- First, download the Computer Modern and Latin Modern fonts. Word 2007 supports the OpenType format so get that. Don’t be disheartened by how these fonts look onscreen – some look like total arse, but let’s face it, these fonts were not designed for the screen at all. They look fine when printed or even in a PDF if you zoom in far enough. And stick with “LM Roman 12″ as it has the proper bold font, others may look strange. You can find even more fonts if you install a LaTeX distro like MikTeX and search the installation folder for *.pfm files.
- If you want to approximate BibTeX-style references, get the IEEE citation stylesheet for Microsoft Word 2007 and extract to
C:\Program Files\Microsoft Office\Office12\Bibliography\Style. - Set up your heading sizes and turn on 1.2.3 section numbering. I can’t be bothered explaining how so here’s a sample word document to get you started.
- Make sure you use the LM fonts for all figures and diagrams for consistency. However, for built-in equations, you’re stuck with Cambria Math, which Microsoft built especially for equations, but it doesn’t look too bad.
When you’ve finished your document it should look something like this PDF of the sample template linked to above.
Hi,
I’ve been trying to get a LaTeX-looking document the “easy and lazy” way. Followed your guide but I can’t seem to download the sample word document. I get a .zip with loads of xml, but no document to link them…
Thanks for any help!
nostra16
Rename the zip to .docx. You’ll need word 2007. I’m not sure why it’s downloading as zip will look into it
Great article! Thanks for that. I followed the instructions and the text looks good in word (if you zoom in far enough) but once I save it as pdf in word2007 the pdf looks really bad (grainy/pixelated). It’s even like that when I use your word-document. Any idea why my word can’t produce a decent pdf and yours can?
I don’t use Word’s built in PDF feature. I print to PDF using something like Bullzip. Much nicer results.
Cheers for the help. I’ve been looking for an easy way of doing this. When you download the .otf font packages, where do you save them for word 2007 to use? Also do you need both Computer modern and latin modern fonts or is it a case of one or the other?
Cheers
.OTF are font files. Install them to Windows like you would install a .TTF file. As for the fonts (it’s been a while) I think one is serif and the other is sans serif. E.g one is Cambria and the other is Corbel
Yeah, but Word won’t do ‘kerning’ thing with opentype fonts, so it won’t look as good as latex
microsoft
Have you tried this free doc->latex converter:
http://wordtolatex.sourceforge.net/
It converts the entire doc including equations, images, etc. Online samples look great.
Just a short a reply to the previous comment. Word-to-LaTeX moved to http://www.wordtolatex.com
Hi, thank you very much, it is all that I need. But, I have a particular question. When I save my docx document as a pdf file, the size is to large when I used the Latin Modern Fonts (LM Roman 12). For example, using arial o times new roma the size (of my document) is 800K but, using LM Roman 12 the size is 4.5M. May you help me.
Thanks,
Try something else to make the PDF like Bullzip
Hi
Sorry to bother you. I could not get the LM Roman 12 from the website.
Is there an alternative website? I could only get the LM Roman 10, not as good as the 12.
Please. Thank you.
Hey,
Great article!
I’m having trouble installing the fonts :-S
I have copied the OTF files into the folder C:\Windows\Fonts but when I open word I cannot see the LM font in the font list…am I doing something wrong?
Thanks for your help
Hello you make no mention of using the Computer Modern fonts in your article. Have you just included this as an alternative to the Latin Modern fonts…or am I missing something?
Great article by the way
Hi…
Nice template – works great in MS word2010, but i cant figure out how you insert pictures and make the figure caption look right..
And how do I make citations to the figures.?
Errr, I’ve a much simpler solution – if you download software like Lyx (which is a GUI that compiles using LaTeX, which I’d highly recommend) you can get actual LaTeX quality without all the hard work and mucking about… It’s really easy to use!
Your links to computer modern and latin modern seem to be broken…
hello,
Anybody knows if this work with MS Office 2010?
What files in the link: computer modern and latin modern, do I have to download, and what dirctory shall I copy the files to?
Jacklyn: LyX is a much of a relief compared to raw Latex, however you still have to spend too much time having things exactly as you want them to be i.e. figures – unless you accept the default composition.
works pretty well.
Si: Thanks for the little cheat
Thanks for the article. Everything worked.