Cfrgtkky

I agree that it is impossible to completely imitate (La)TeX in Word. If you just want the font, then there is an OpenType version of Computer Modern, the default font of TeX. If you want the margins, just measure them on a LaTeX document and then set them in Word accordingly (I would recommend that you use KOMA Script or memoir as a base, not the default LaTeX classes, as the look imo better on A4 and letter paper.)

There is also a LaTeX template for Word. Since I don't own Word, I can't tell how good it looks.

Besides all the 'it isn't possible' advice, what I would advice is:

• Use the LaTeX Template for Word mentioned by Caramdir (make sure to install the 3 mentioned fonts)


• The author section of the IEEE website also provides a 2-column Word template for their papers, resembling quite a lot the LaTeX one.
  Other academic publishers (like Elsevier) also have similar Word templates (use Google to find them).


• Make your document look as consistent as possible. I think that, apart from the typesetting, the consistent output produced by LaTeX is one of the things that make it look like LaTeX. Most Word documents have the tendency to be a collection of slightly-different layouted text blocks because there is nothing that forces the user to do otherwise.
  Practically, this translates to using paragraph and character styles rigorously. These could be the styles from the template mentioned, or your own defined styles. (BTW: The key to using styles in Word is to assign shortcut-keys for the most-used ones)


• A wider left margin also might make it more LaTeX-like


• Use a small font (10pt or so)


• Indent the first line of each paragraph (although I personally don't like that)


• Put your tables and figures at the bottom or top of a page

No, you can't do it. One of the biggest differences between LaTeX and Word (and most other word processors for that matter) is that LaTeX (based on TeX) does run optimization algorithms to decide where to break paragraphs into lines and your document into pages. These algorithms try to find the most “appealing” way to flow the text of your document into pages. TeX will even let you know when it couldn't do a good enough job and sometimes complain about under- and overfull boxes.

Almost every other word processor, including MS Word, will blindly stack words into lines until they don't fit anymore, and start a new line there. Hyphenation makes things a bit better, but still no attempt is done in order to find “good” points to break lines in order to make the paragraphs look better.

You can call a mule a horse, but will never make it a horse. No amount of fiddling can make a Word document look like one typeset with TeX, especially one that contains a serious amount of maths.

Major difference will remain in letter spacing, interword space, paragraph justification, hyphenation, page breaking and adjustment of floats.

If you are forced to use Word at work, one way - to simulate TeX with Word - is to typeset your documents with LaTeX and import them as images in your Word document!

I offer two options for you (Option 2 is best if you aren't going to compile anymore):

Option 1

Download OpenOffice for free and download writer2latex, also free. It supports xelatex export too! It also does a nice job exporting tables.

Option 2
A project I worked on to make Word documents resemble LaTeX documents. You will need a Mac for this.

https://github.com/macmadness86/applescript

Note: You can edit the plist file to your liking.

• set margins


• set font sizes for various heading styles


• toggle bold or italics for various styles

Additional Scripts

This AppleScript handler sets the font for all styles. It can be expanded to set specific styles, but I have not finished it yet. I recommend using Latin Modern Roman, because it is the unicode font, which replaces CMU when working with XeLateX. Warning: There is a glitch in that when changing the name property of the font object of Word styles, a list template is applied to heading 1. I do not know why this happens. This is not a problem in the original script above, because of a complicated workaround using the find and replace command.

set fontChoice to text returned of (display dialog "Please select a font" default answer "Latin Modern Roman")

my setupfontObjectStyle___("all", fontChoice)



on setupfontObjectStyle___(styleName, newValue)

    -- use styleName "all" if you need to  

    tell application "Microsoft Word"

        tell active document

            if styleName is equal to "all" then

                set wordStylesList to Word styles

                try

                    repeat with styleStep from 1 to count of wordStylesList

                        set name of font object of item styleStep of wordStylesList to newValue

                    end repeat

                on error

                    display dialog "There was a problem with the script."

                end try

            end if

        end tell

    end tell

end setupfontObjectStyle___

This script zooms word perfectly to fit a styles menu panel on the right side of the program so that you can see the other "Word Styles Setup" in action. Designed for a 13-inch monitor. (tested on Macbook Air)

tell application "Microsoft Word"

    activate

    set width of active window to 1243

    set height of active window to 820

    set position of active window to {0, 76}

    set percentage of zoom of view of active window to 196

    get bounds of window 1

end tell

Even if you cannot match LaTeX quality with MS Word, that doesn't mean you cannot produce great-looking documents with it. If you are a designer, you'll get great-looking document no matter what app you're using. Couple of months ago I read an article which made me stop and rethink. The tool one is using is important, but not the most important part of document production. The main actor from the link I provided is witnessing that.

Well, it sounds dumb, but you could technically do this. If you're required to do something in MS Word (and, well, want to "stick it to the man"), you could technically still submit your document in MS Word by first writing it in LaTeX, then writing some sort of script (you're probably stuck using VBA) to take each page of the PDF or DVI file rendered by TeX and insert it into a page of MS Word, with 0" margins on each side. It wouldn't be editable, but it would definitely look exactly like a LaTeX document. Word can probably also open PDF files as is (don't have a copy to try it out on, so I don't know), so that would also technically be in MS Word.

But beyond this (slightly absurd) suggestion, I completely agree with the other answers. TeX/LaTeX is much, much more than just a template, so trying to implement even an appreciable subset of it's features in a template-like formalism is just not going to cut it.

If it was vice versa it would be much easier. Using xelatex one can use the Word standard fonts to mimic it's look: http://uweziegenhagen.de/?p=1359

Happy TeXing!

Use this template with the fonts listed:

http://www.frostnova.net/archives/fake-latex.html

And follow these tips:

http://jeffhuang.com/better_word_papers.html

You should get a pretty decent approximation.

A most simple way to produce a latex looking doc in word is simplified into steps.

1. Use Century font


2. Refer an original latex document(e: if you are working on a project report, then collect a latex made project report)--- and then type the words exactly in same place as in latex doc... with almost same font size, orientation , position, margin etc.


3. Save it as pdf (install save as pdf addon if you dont have it).


4. Now see the magic...your ms word doc will now have 90% similiarity with original ltex made document....

Mac Instructions only
Based on James Lingard's MS Word template page.

Lingard's template file (LaTeX.dot) can be used to produce documents that look a lot like they've been typeset in TeX/LaTeX but you'll need to install the Computer Modern TrueType versions of fonts used by LaTeX to make them available in MS Word.

Installing the fonts:

1. Download the minimum set: cmr10.ttf, cmbx12.ttf and cmbx10.ttf and other suggested tt files (e.g. bakoma true type fonts)




2. Once downloaded on the Mac, go to the download location and open the files by double-clicking. This starts Font Book which opens the tt (TrueType) font file.
   Font Book is included with OS/X. Basic instructions on using Font Book from Apple.




3. Font Book provides a small display of the font and gives an option to "Install Font" via the button at bottom right of the window.




4. Click Install Font; Font Book then checks/validates the font. You might need to review warnings, all trivial as far as I make it, after which the font is now available for Mac applications to use.
   




5. The next time you open MS Word it will spend 30s or so updating its font listing.

Installing the Template:

Mac instructions only: You add Lindgard's LaTeX.dot file to the appropriate templates folder:

MS Word template location. From the Finder menu; Finder>Go>Go to Folder...

~/Library/Application Support/Microsoft/Office/User Templates/My Templates

Then create a new MS Word document based on the template via:

1. From the MS Word menu bar: File > New from Template...




2. The MS Word "Document Gallery" window opens...




3. Select "My Templates" in the navigation pane...




4. Select the template named "LaTeX"

Your new document is now using Lindgard's stylesheet in MS Word, which should also be using the bakoma TrueType fonts.
The screen and output should now mimic a LaTeX typeset document very closely.

If you are "forced to use MS Word to write my reports", I assume that it is because you are working in a team that uses MS Word to produce collaborative documents, and not that you don't have access to TeX.

I am in a similar situation. I still try to work in TeX as much as possible, because a) I am more comfortable with the workflow and b) because it produces much nicer documents.

These are the workarounds that I use to work with our team.

1. If I am the owner of the document, I first write it in LaTeX, convert it to PDF, open it in MS Word and save it, before sharing it with the team. This works well with simple documents, but only the Windows version of Word can open PDFs. I incorporate any comments I get back from the team in Word versions back in my LaTeX and make the final product a PDF from the LaTeX. The formatting is translated well, particularly if you use the same fonts, but beware that anything but very simple mathematical formulae can get mangled by this process.




2. For slightly more complicated documents, I use pandoc, writing the document in Markdown and then using a workflow similar to that described J. Alexander Branham, making a DOCX from the Markdown while the final product is a LaTeX to PDF from the Markdown.




3. For documents owned by others, I tend to have little control over the format and have to work directly with the Word, but I do what I can to clean up and simplify the mess of styles I often come across, in a way that subtly improves the final product.

If you want to use LaTeX, you could get the mk4ht package, and use this to convert LaTeX documents to Open Office format, and open these in Word (2007+) and have the best of both worlds.

That being said, if you have the JDK installed on your system (at least in Ubuntu) this breaks, and you need to use htlatex to convert TeX to HTML and thus to Open Office and hence to Word.

Why not use LaTeX, then parse them through TextoWord?
I haven't used it myself, and have absolutely no intention of doing so, but I understand that it works very well.
There's also LatextoRTF.

I may have come up with a good way to mimic the style (including the equations and index) to that of a LaTeX document.

Download the Latin Modern math fonts (the Latin Modern Collection—OTF files are also available).

Install all fonts from the ZIP files and then create a style file for Word. With that done just simply export your files as PDFs. Here are my samples.