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There is a tetex howto.   In theory you can convert plain text to dvi with 
tex, and defaults are 10 cpi, Roman, L and R justified.  Emacs has a TeX 
mode.  Tex and latex both produce .tex.  Latex appears to be tex with 
added features such as underlines.

It is a nuisance to type things like \centerline and \voffset (centered 
text, and changing top margin).

Nano does search and replace but it is interactive, meaning you have to 
tell it every time to replace.

Can sed search and replace \c and \vo with \centerline and \voffset?
Could one write a script with sed to do several such replacements in one 
sweep?  Or program Ctrl-F1 etc. to produce these strings?

I would probably type the document first and then add the formatting.  tex 
is supposed to adjust line lengths to fit the text length (not including 
formatting commands) when converting to dvi, which you can view with xdvi.

tex is about 230K and requires tex.fmt (another 200K or so).  The tetex 
bin package includes also pdftex (make tex into pdf) 500K, pslatex 500 
bytes, dvilj and dvilj2p (80K), dvilj4 (85K), dvips (165K), dvihp
(deskjet?), dvi2fax (tiff?), xdvi (500K) and many others.

The howto says a minimal install is only 10-15MB (in 1998).  Probably much 
less for just producing a dvi file to convert to rtf.

There is a DOS latex2rtf (1.4MB package), also win and mac. 
The linux binary (300K - 2005 beta) needs GTK+ 2.6 and autopackage which 
'will be automatically downloaded and installed before the LaTeX2RTF 
installation begins".

I tried to install it and was told I had an Error in MD5 sums.

To use the new menu item I need to restart the desktop.  ????

keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org