How to convert a Word manuscript into a journal LaTeX template

Why a straight Word-to-LaTeX export is not enough

Generic converters translate formatting, not structure. They turn bold text into \textbf and keep your manual numbering, but a journal class wants the title in \title, the abstract in its own environment, authors and affiliations in the publisher's macros, and references as BibTeX entries. A file that compiles but ignores those slots is sent back by production editors.

Step 1 — clean the manuscript first

• Use real heading styles in Word (Heading 1, Heading 2) so sections can be told apart from body text.
• Keep every figure as a separate high-resolution file (PNG, JPG or PDF) named after its figure number.
• Write equations with Word's equation editor rather than as images.
• Make the reference list consistent — one style, every entry with authors, year, title and venue, and a DOI where one exists.

Step 2 — pick the exact template

Use the class the journal names in its author guidelines, not a look-alike: IEEEtran for IEEE Transactions and IEEE Access, acmart for ACM, elsarticle for Elsevier, sn-jnl for Springer Nature journals, llncs for Springer's Lecture Notes, the MDPI class for MDPI journals and the Wiley class for Wiley titles. Each has its own author block and reference style, which is most of the conversion work.

Step 3 — move the parts into the template

1. Front matter: title, authors with affiliations and corresponding author, abstract, keywords — in the class's own commands.
2. Body: one \section per Heading 1 and \subsection per Heading 2; remove manual numbers, the class numbers them.
3. Figures and tables: a figure environment per image with \includegraphics, a caption and a \label; rebuild tables with tabular (booktabs reads best) rather than pasting them as pictures.
4. Equations: an equation environment per numbered equation, labelled so the text can use \ref.
5. References: a .bib file and the bibliography style the journal asks for; cite with \cite so numbering follows the class.

In Format Studio this is the Structure & format step: drop the file, choose the target journal and it rebuilds the manuscript on that class — IEEE Transactions, IEEE Access, ACM, ICLR, Nature, Springer LNCS, Elsevier, MDPI and Wiley are built in. Figures are added once and reused across compiles.

Step 4 — compile and fix the errors

The first compile rarely runs clean. The usual culprits are special characters that LaTeX treats as commands (%, &, _, #), Unicode symbols pasted from Word, a figure file name that does not match, and references cited by a key that is not in the .bib file. Read the first error, not the last — later errors are usually consequences of it. Format Studio compiles on pdfLaTeX, XeLaTeX or LuaLaTeX with a live PDF next to the source, and its AI assistant can read the log and repair the failing region.

Step 5 — check it against the author guidelines

• Page limit and column format in the compiled PDF, not in Word.
• Figure resolution and fonts embedded in the PDF.
• Reference style, including how DOIs are shown — the BibTeX cleaner removes duplicates and flags entries missing required fields.
• Anonymisation for double-blind venues: no author names, no self-identifying acknowledgements.

Then export what the submission system wants: the PDF, the main.tex, or a .zip of the whole project. A Word copy of the formatted paper can be exported too, for co-authors who do not use LaTeX.

Moving between two journals' templates

After a rejection the same paper often has to move from one class to another, for example from IEEE to Elsevier. Because the content is already structured, switching templates is a re-format rather than a rewrite: the front matter is rebuilt for the new class, and the bibliography style changes with it.