LaTeX integration

I found the process of converting my LaTeX formatted proposal into the Markdown format to be manual busywork that could have been better done by a program. Having an automatic LaTeX to Markdown conversion button would greatly reduce the workload of the proposal author.

I found that this conversion process consisted of a few separate tasks:

1. Remove any LaTeX specific code (e.g. \documentclass{}) and convert special characters (e.g. \%) to their regular counterparts.
2. Format LaTeX control sequences to the Markdown equivalent (e.g. changing \section to #).
3. Uploading figures and porting the labels and references (e.g. \label{} to [:figure](metanodes)).
4. Converting the Bibtex reference file to DOIs.

Of the above tasks, I found the Bibtex to DOI conversion the most annoying, since there were many references and the automatic export function of most websites do not include the DOI in the auto-generated Bibtex files.

If a fully automated LaTeX to Markdown converter is too difficult to write, then I would be more than satisfied to see a Bibtex to DOI converter, since that represented perhaps the task which took the longest.

Pandoc, the universal document converter, should be able to handle most of the conversion besides images and citations. Math will be trivial.

I generally lookup DOIs manually using crossref, although the lookup could presumably be mostly automated.

Cool, thanks for the tip!

Thanks for the great suggestion.

I suspect if we have a LaTeX file we could do most, if not all, conversion automatically. Perhaps with the help of Pandoc. Crossref has an API we are working with for DOI lookup so that shouldn't be a problem.

That said, I'm putting this as "deferred" for now because we're just going to provide a service where users can email us their proposal and we'll enter it for them. See new instructions for publishing a proposal:

As soon as this becomes too much of a hassle we'll implement a more automated solution.

@tongli sorry you weren't made aware of this possibility sooner. But thank you for taking the time to enter your proposal — your feedback has been very valuable.

Ah, I wasn't aware of that option. That seems like a good way to attract new users and users who are not familiar with Markdown.