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When I collaborate with other individuals, I generally receive text to be typeset in the form of a word document. However, it seems that there are almost always characters that, when I copy and paste - for lack of a better word, "bugger up" pdflatex.

Is there a way to sanitize these special characters and replace them with their plain text cognates?

with ', double-spaces with space, and so on.

Note: I could very well be referring to an issue associated with encoding, but I don't understand that - and neither will my collaborators.

PS: No idea what tag is relevant here, so please do so appropriately should you have the ability to do so.

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Have you tried inputenc with the utf8 option set? –  Canageek Mar 2 '12 at 5:49
I recommend sed for tasks like this because I don't think a LaTeX package can/should solve these problems and because sed is made for things like this. –  Marc van Dongen Mar 2 '12 at 6:10
@BrandonBertelsen Perhaps it's the other way around (windows isn't particularly sed friendly). –  Marc van Dongen Mar 2 '12 at 6:28
sed should work fine in cygwin. I understand the overhead involved in that though. You may want to check out the regular expressions abilities of other languages. Python works extremely well with Windows for example. –  qubyte Mar 2 '12 at 7:20
You could try to open the doc-file in OpenOffice and then use the writer2latex plugin. –  schmendrich Mar 2 '12 at 8:43
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up vote 3 down vote accepted

A summary of the comments, in order of ease of use:

  • \usepackage[utf8]{inputenc}
  • Open in OpenOffice Writer, use writer2latex plugin
  • Use antiword and then pandoc to convert to tex.
  • Use sed to find replace encoded characters
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