📄 Paperajcli: A Lightweight Bridge from Word to LaTeX

Microsoft Word remains the de facto tool for collaborative academic writing—whether you're drafting manuscripts with co‑authors or assembling a thesis with committee feedback. While Pandoc can convert Word documents into LaTeX, integrating journal or thesis templates and managing citations often becomes cumbersome. Paperajcli solves this gap by offering a simple, structured way to export Word sections directly into LaTeX components using pandoc.

Paperajcli works by detecting custom delimiters inside your .docx file and exporting each marked section into its own LaTeX file. For example, a Word document containing blocks like below:

<paperaj-introduction>
Introduction

This is the introduction section content.
</paperaj-introduction>

<paperaj-methods>
Methods

Methods go here...
</paperaj-methods>

will produce clean, modular LaTeX files (e.g., introduction.tex, methods.tex) in an output directory of your choice. The formatting of these files will be preserved(e.g. H1 -> \section{} and H2 -> \subsection{}). These files can be seamlessly included in any LaTeX template using commands such as:

\input{myfolder/methods.tex}

✨ Paperajcli preserves commonly used LaTeX commands—including \cite{}—so you can rely on native LaTeX citation workflows without extra tooling. This makes it ideal for users who prefer Zotero, JabRef, or other BibTeX‑based reference managers. Use this csl with Zotero to ensure compatibility with Pandoc's citation processing. After exporting your sections, simply add your .bib file to your LaTeX project and compile as usual using any citation package (e.g., natbib, biblatex) and style.

🚀 Recommended Workflow

1. Clone a LaTeX project template from Overleaf.
2. Run Paperajcli to export your Word sections into a directory inside the template.
3. Insert each exported .tex file into the appropriate location using \input{}.
4. Manage citations in Zotero and export your references as a .bib file.
5. Add the .bib file to your repository and push the project back to Overleaf.
6. Compile the document.

This workflow keeps the collaborative convenience of Word while giving you the precision, structure, and template‑compatibility of LaTeX—without the usual friction. 🎉 Please ⭐️ If you find this project useful!

Prerequisites

• Node.js: version 18 or higher.
• Pandoc: Must be installed and available in your system PATH.
  • MacOS: brew install pandoc
  • Windows: choco install pandoc
  • Linux: sudo apt-get install pandoc

Usage

The primary command is latex.

# Syntax
npx paperajcli latex <input-file> <output-directory> [flags]

# Example
npx paperajcli latex tests/paperaj.docx output/

Arguments

• file: Path to the MS-Word (.docx) file to convert.
• outputDir: Directory where the resulting .tex files and media/ folder will be saved.

Flags

• --dry-run (-d): Preview the actions (converting, splitting) without writing any files to disk. Useful for verifying section detection.
• --extract-media / --no-extract-media: Control media extraction from DOCX (default: true). Use --no-extract-media to skip extracting images and other media files.
• --help: Show CLI help.

Integrating Generated Files

The tool regenerates modular LaTeX files (e.g., introduction.tex, methods.tex). You can include these in your master LaTeX template using:

\input{output/introduction}
\input{output/methods}

The tool handles figure and table environments automatically based on the input document structure.

Post-Processing

The tool performs several post-processing operations on the generated LaTeX:

LaTeX Command Preservation

You can use LaTeX commands directly in your MS-Word document, and they will be preserved in the output:

• \cite{reference} - Citations
• \href{url}{text} - Hyperlinks
• \ref{label} - Cross-references
• \label{name} - Labels
• Math commands like \frac{}{}, \begin{equation}, etc.

These commands will be automatically un-escaped during conversion.

Figure and Table Handling

• Figure captions: Use format Figure 1: Caption Text in Word
  • Add : TWOCOLUMN for two-column figures (figure* environment)
  • Add : LATEXROTATE for rotated figures (sidewaysfigure environment)
• Table captions: Use format Table 1: Caption Text in Word
• Cross-references: References like Figure_1, Table_2, Appendix_A are automatically converted to \ref{} commands

Special Character Handling

• Escaped braces \{ and \} are converted to regular braces
• et al. is automatically removed
• Triple dashes -/-/- are converted to em-dashes ---

Testing

Run unit and integration tests:

npm test

Contributing

Pull requests are welcome! See CONTRIBUTING.md.

Contributors

• Bell Eapen