Hello,

I am trying to generate a doc file from latex source for a colleague (simple
article class, using authblk package) through one of the two following
ways :

1. Create an odt file using :

$mk4ht oolatex document.tex "xhtml,ooffice,mathml"

This generates a truckload of document-mxx.tmp files, one for each
mathematical symbol as far as I can tell. The resulting odt file opens
cleanly in openoffice but all the mathematical symbols (superscripts etc.)
are rendered as images. That is not so bad. However, some of the
superscripts have funny characters underneath them (think a brace of
inverted question marks). What is the reason for this ?

Further, double clicking on a citation does not take me to the reference. It
just shows a short name (which is the number of the citation). No author
details, nothing.

2. Create an html file using :

$mk4ht htlatex document.tex "xhtml,mathml,word"

This generates an excellent html+css version of the document (excellent job,
guys). All the mathematical symbols are fine, etc (hint : the use of
option "word" above appears to fix some misrendered superscripts you would
get otherwise). I have Microsoft Word 2007 installed on a laptop running
windows XP. What I do next is to open the html document in Word and save as
docx (or doc).

However, the links generated for the citations are of the form :

file:///home/.../document.html#Xauthname:08a

Now, when word opens this, the citations generated are meaningless as well.

I know LaTeX and Word are separate word processing solutions with entirely
different philosophies. What makes LaTeX the correct solution for me is the
amount of math in the document (something that would take me tons of time
using word) and what a nightmare handling citations is in Word (even with
Endnote - years of using bibtex have spoiled me forever ).

But is there something I can do during html generation that will help me
recover proper citations ? This is not an html conversion + Word specific
problem - I have the same issue when I generate an odt and open it in
openoffice (see above).

An issue possibly arising from mk4ht :

On my home machine, I am able to generate html that opens in word without
any issues. However, at work, the generated html just shows up a bunch of
xml tags in word which offers to apply any xsl transformation I want to
them. I have not been able to figure out why this difference exists. Is it
because I am missing some transformation package (so that mk4ht is unable
to somehow include the xsl information) on my work machine ? Note - the
test windows environment is IDENTICAL for html files generated from two
different installations of TeXLive.

I am not an xml expert.

PS : Is there a way to directly convert tex to office open xml (I know even
Microsoft Word 2007 does not fully implement that joke of a standard.) ?
That would fix this entire problem.