Human

Researchers write in LaTeX, but many conferences and journals accept only Word. The free converters we tried lose figures, leave equations as plain text, ignore the venue's template and silently drop references. On IEEE's own sample paper, one converter turned three clean two-column pages into seven single-column ones. A professor told a friend of mine: "If a conference only takes Word, drop that conference." This came from my own experience: the night before a deadline I searched forums and Reddit for a fix, and found nothing that worked. PaperProof turns a LaTeX project (a .tex file or a whole .zip with figures and bibliography) into an editable Word document in the venue's official template (IEEE Conference A4 / US Letter; Springer LNCS), and then checks what survived. How it works: a safe project reader (zip limits, include confinement, figure path resolution); the open-source tex2word engine for the base conversion to real Word equations, tables and figures; our template layer, which applies the official Word template (styles, page size, columns, heading numbering, captions, author block); repairs that are kept only if a re-check shows they helped and lost nothing; and an independent checker that compares the Word file with the LaTeX source and reports what was lost, with evidence. A local web app shows the real conversion stages, a preview rendered by Word from the same file, and a corrected / needs-review / preserved report. What is different: most converters stop at a file. PaperProof verifies the result and tells you what it lost. It runs entirely on your computer, so unpublished papers never leave your machine. Templates are data, so a new venue is a profile, not a rewrite. Honest status: on six unseen IEEE papers, two came out with no checker defects; the others lost figures, leaked macros or had equation problems, all documented in the repo. Known limits include bibliography styling for .bib projects, and Springer. 94 unit tests pass. We are continuing to build it: a fresh test set, more venues and detailed live Meta evaluation are next.