New Members ⇒ Eager beginner, need to convert books from Word to LaTeX

[Jackck]

Hi Everyone,

I'm happy to see so many new recent members. Most of what I read on the subject is quite old.

I have to quickly learn how to convert book manuscripts written in Word into LaTeX. I'm starting from zero.

I chose LaTeX over InDesign. I'm not sure if its mostly my contrarian nature and preference for open-source, or if I'm actually convinced that LaTeX can do a better job more quickly. Any reassurance here would be welcome.

I started with MikTeX on a Windows 10 machine, but encountered unresolvable problems. So removed it and installed TeXLive, which worked. Also got TeXStudio as editor. Have an installation on my Ubuntu laptop too, but with MikTex and TexMaker. Maybe I should standardise on TexLive and TexStudio?

I've read the Not So Short Intro and am working through some Youtube tutorials and the Companion. Any suggestions for other resources, books, tutorials, etc, would be welcome.

So far I've tried a few ways of converting from Word format: docx2latex, Word -> Livreoffice ODT -> export as LaTeX via an extension, and finally Pandoc. Not sure which is best yet. Still learning about the basic structures, packages etc.

Any advice, best practices, guides, hellos, etc would be most welcome.

Jack