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

chuckg_63193 0
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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'd like. Now I need the same document to be converted to plain old ASCII.

Example:
I have seen this done (at least once) here, where the author has a PDF version and an ASCII version that matches the PDF version in almost every way, including margins, spacing and bullet points.

I realize this type of conversion cannot be exact due to limitations in the ASCII format, but a very close approximation does seem possible based on what I have found so far. What is the process for doing this?

ascii latex
14 Answers

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

Jason_Moore_337240

You can try some of the programs proposed here:

TeX to ASCII

user_623650

Another option is to use htlatex to create a web page from the LaTeX sources, then use links to convert to plain text. I used the command line

links -dump -no-numbering -no-references input.html > output.txt

in the past which gave a rather nice result. This will of course rather match the view of the rendered HTML than the original PDF, thus maybe not exactly what you want.

bluebrother_603350

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...

user_534910

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.

user_2551910

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

user_26703700
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