Latex To Indesign

I've been producing a technical book in Lyx. I've decided that for this work, I'ld be better off using Adobe Indesign. It need allot of complex layout/graphical stuff. Like timelines, sidebars, complex tables (I have some tables, but I want to do things like put text in a smaller font underneath the text I've got, which LyX's GUI doesn't support). Of course it's possible. Just keep the pdf from latex open on one monitor and copy it to InDesign on another. Is there a program that does it automatically? I would guess no. Not without some serious double work. If it's a simple document I would copy the source over, and then use find/replace to change markup macros to InDesign format. Perhaps you can include PDF images, such as if equations, into Indesign. LaTeX to Indesign may go via an intermediate format, such as RTF or DOC or others, using for example pandoc. Indesign to LaTeX may in theory work via XML export and parsing that. But as Johannes said, also I think there is no readily usable tool for such a conversion.

Looking for a free text converter? Look no more, upload your LaTeX files and convert them to InDesign ICML files. Yes, it’s that easy.

Converting from LaTeX

LaTeX was developed in 1984 and no, that’s not a typo. It’s nearly 40 years old. It started as a writing tool for mathematicians and computer scientists, but has quickly been taken up by scholars who wanted to write documents with math expressions or non-Latin scripts (Arabic or Chinese for example). As with a lot of other text document formats, it’s used to structure the content, not style it. LaTeX is used directly or as an intermediate format to produce files for printing or digital distribution. It supports highlighting (such as bold or italic), citations and cross-references. Or to make it short: It’s the most powerful format to structure your texts. Convert all your files to LaTeX.

The files end with .tex by default.

Converting to InDesign ICML

An ICML file contains Adobe InCopy stories. This is the file format you want to use to collaborate with a designer that uses Adobe Indesign. I have no idea why you should use this file format instead. There are so many free, open, documented, better text formats out there. An Adobe file format would be the least I’d use to store relevant information. But I don’t want to stop you. If you are here to convert a few files online, you have probably a reason already. At least it’s free to convert the files here. So good luck with your project! Keep up the good work!

The files end with .icml by default.

Other free online converters

Looking for a free text converter? Look no more, upload your LaTeX files and convert them to InDesign ICML files. Yes, it’s that easy.