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

If you are using pdflatex, you probably don't want to mess around with your package options to switch to latex to generate a DVI.

Instead, take your pdf file and convert that instead. This worked for my CV/resume made with the Curve package:

pdftotext  -layout MyResume.pdf

Note the -layout flag.

Answer 2

The solution that works best for me is the following. Assuming you have the latex document name (without extension) stored in ${BASENAME} you apply these 3 steps:

htlatex ${BASENAME}.tex

iconv -f iso-8859-1 -t utf-8 ${BASENAME}.html > ${BASENAME}-utf8.html

html2markdown ${BASENAME}-utf8.html > ${BASENAME}.txt

Apparently, you need to have tex4ht and python-html2text installed.