5.5 File Conversions

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Converting from one file format to another is a complex yet common task. Here we collect together a variety of conversion tasks and the tools to perform them.

We can often use pandoc for much of the hard work. File types supported include docx, md, org, pdf, rst, tex, though some, like docx are only supported for output.

pandoc mydoc.tex -o mydoc.md        # LaTeX to Markdown
pandoc mydoc.md  -o mydoc.docx      # Markdown to Microsoft Word

To convert Microsoft and LibreOffice documents to pdf, as also covered in Section 95.5, we can use libreoffice itself, invoked in headless mode from the command line:

libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf input.docx   # Microosft Word to PDF
libreoffice --headless --convert-to pdf input.xlsx   # Microsoft Excel to PDF

Jupyter notebook conversions are provided by jupyter-nbconvert:

jupyter-nbconvert --to markdown doc.ipynd --stdout > doc.md
jupyter-nbconvert --to python   doc.ipynd --stdout > doc.py
jupyter-nbconvert --to python   doc.ipynd --stdout > doc.R

Another type of conversion results from MS/Windows using a different line ending convention for text files to GNU/Linux (and Unix). Originally dos2unix was used for this task which is now accomplished by flip which will convert the file in-place:

$ flip -u doc.txt # Convert to GNU/Linux format.
$ flip -m doc.txt # Convert to MS/Windows format.


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