Converting LaTeX to RTFEdit

Created 7/27/2007, updated 3/12/2020

I was recently looking for a copy of the GPL version 3 in RTF format but the FSF website only provides copies in plain text, LaTeX or Texinfo formats (see here).

The reason I wanted an RTF version is that I was hoping for a soft-wrapped version that would look nice when displayed in Apple's installer, but I didn't want to install the enormous TeX/LaTeX machinery in order to work with the formats provided by the FSF.

I found this handy tool, latex2rtf, which is able to work largely independently.

# download and extract
curl -O "http://jaist.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/latex2rtf/latex2rtf-1.9.16a.tar.gz"
tar xzvf latex2rtf-1.9.16a.tar.gz
cd latex2rtf-1.9.16a

# build
make

# check: fails miserably unless you install it first
make check

# try it out on the GPL (fails miserably)
curl -O http://www.gnu.org/licenses/gpl-3.0.tex
./latex2rtf gpl-3.0.tex

# seems you have to install it first to get it to work
sudo make install

# now check fails less spectacularly
make check

# and the conversion works
latex2rtf gpl-3.0.tex

However, in the end the generated RTF still had the unwanted hard wrapping in some sections, so I ended up just undoing the wrapping in TextMate (Control-Option-Q) and then adding appropriate styling in TextEdit.