How do I convert LaTeX to plain-text (ASCII)?

Question

Scenario:
I have a document I created using LaTeX (my resume in this case), it\'s compiling in pdflatex correctly and outputting exactly what I\'

Answer 1

Try the steps here: http://zanedp.livejournal.com/201222.html

Here is a sequence that converts my LaTeX file to plain text:

$ latex file.tex
$ catdvi -e 1 -U file.dvi | sed -re "s/\[U\+2022\]/*/g" | sed -re "s/([^^[:space:]])\s+/\1 /g" > file.txt

The -e 1 option to catdvi tells it to output ASCII. If you use 0 instead of 1, it will output Unicode. Unicode will include all the special characters like bullets, emdashes, and Greek letters. It also include ligatures for some letter combinations like "fi" and "fl." You may not like that. So, use -e 1 instead. Use the -U option to tell it to print out the unicode value for unknown characters so that you can easily find and replace them.

The second part of the command finds the string [U+2022] which is used to designate bullet characters (•) and replaces them with an asterisk (*).

The third part eats up all the extra whitespace catdvi threw in to make the text full-justified while preserving spaces at the start of lines (indentation).

After running these commands, you would be wise to search the .txt file for the string [U+ to make sure no Unicode characters that can't be mapped to ASCII were left behind and fix them.

Answer 2

you can import into lyx and use lyx's export to text feature.

kind of silly if you don't use lyx but if you already have it, very quick and easy solution. Good result for me, although to be fair my files are pretty simple. Not sure how more elaborate files get converted.

Answer 3

CatDVI can convert DVI to text and attempts to preserve the formatting.

Answer 4

My usual strategy is to use hyperlatex to turn it into a web page, and then cope and paste from a web browser. I find that this gives the best formatting.

I usually then have to go through and manually fix some line-wrapping...

Answer 5

Emacs has the commands iso-iso2tex and iso-tex2iso that work very well, except it doesn't convert single commands like \OE to Œ.

Answer 6

Pandoc allows you to convert files from one format to other Use following pandoc command:

pandoc -s /path/to/foobar.tex -o foobar.txt

If you want your lines to break at a certain column use --column flag. Use --columns 10000 for non-breaking line.

You can convert -o foobar.txt to a number of other formats like markdown (.md) etc. If you don't specify the -o foobar.txt, pandoc will print the html that you can render in any online tool.

To install pandoc follow this official documentation