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Conversion from (La)TeX to plain text

The aim here is to emulate the Unix nroff, which formats text as best it can for the screen, from the same input as the Unix typesetting program troff.

Converting DVI to plain text is the basis of many of these techniques; sometimes the simple conversion provides a good enough response. Options are:

• dvi2tty (one of the earliest),
• crudetype and
• catdvi, which is capable of generating Latin-1 (ISO 8859-1) or UTF-8 encoded output. Catdvi was conceived as a replacement for dvi2tty, but can’t (quite) be recommended as a complete replacement yet.

Ralph Droms provides a txt bundle of things in support of ASCII generation, but it doesn’t do a good job with tables and mathematics. An alternative is the screen package.

Another possibility is to use the LaTeX-to-ASCII conversion program, l2a, although this is really more of a de-TeXing program.

The canonical de-TeXing program is detex, which removes all comments and control sequences from its input before writing it to its output. Its original purpose was to prepare input for a dumb spelling checker, and it’s only usable for preparing useful ASCII versions of a document in highly restricted circumstances.

Tex2mail is slightly more than a de-TeXer — it’s a Perl script that converts TeX files into plain text files, expanding various mathematical symbols (sums, products, integrals, sub/superscripts, fractions, square roots, …) into “ASCII art” that spreads over multiple lines if necessary. The result is more readable to human beings than the flat-style TeX code.

Another significant possibility is to use one of the HTML-generation solutions, and then to use a browser such as lynx to dump the resulting HTML as plain text.

catdvi

dviware/catdvi (or browse the directory)

crudetype

dviware/crudetype (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

detex

support/detex (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

dvi2tty

dviware/dvi2tty (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

l2a

support/l2a (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

screen.sty

macros/latex209/contrib/misc/screen.sty; catalogue entry

tex2mail

support/tex2mail (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

txt

support/txt (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

Other conversions to and from (La)TeX

troff

Tr2latex, assists in the translation of a troff document into LaTeX 2.09 format. It recognises most -ms and -man macros, plus most eqn and some tbl preprocessor commands. Anything fancier needs to be done by hand. Two style files are provided. There is also a man page (which converts very well to LaTeX…). Tr2latex is an enhanced version of the earlier troff-to-latex (which is no longer available).

WordPerfect

wp2latex is actively maintained, and is available either for MSDOS or for Unix systems.

RTF

Rtf2tex, by Robert Lupton, is for converting Microsoft’s Rich Text Format to TeX. There is also a converter to LaTeX by Erwin Wechtl, called rtf2latex. The latest converter, by Ujwal Sathyam and Scott Prahl, is rtf2latex2e which seems rather good, though development of it seems to have stalled.

Translation to RTF may be done (for a somewhat constrained set of LaTeX documents) by TeX2RTF, which can produce ordinary RTF, Windows Help RTF (as well as HTML, conversion to HTML). TeX2RTF is supported on various Unix platforms and under Windows 3.1

Microsoft Word

A rudimentary (free) program for converting MS-Word to LaTeX is wd2latex, which runs on MSDOS. Word2TeX and TeX2Word are shareware translators from Chikrii Softlab; users’ reports are very positive.

The excellent tex4ht will generate OpenOffice ODT format, which can be used as an intermediate to producing Word format files.

If cost is a constraint, the best bet is probably to use an intermediate format such as RTF or HTML. Word outputs and reads both, so in principle this route may be useful.

You can also use PDF as an intermediate format: Acrobat Reader for Windows (version 5.0 and later) will output rather feeble RTF that Word can read.

Excel

Excel2Latex converts an Excel file into a LaTeX tabular environment; it comes as a .xls file which defines some Excel macros to produce output in a new format.

runoff

Peter Vanroose’s rnototex conversion program is written in VMS Pascal. The sources are distributed with a VAX executable.

refer/tib

There are a few programs for converting bibliographic data between BibTeX and refer/tib formats. The collection includes a shell script converter from BibTeX to refer format as well. The collection is not maintained.

PC-Write

pcwritex.arc is a print driver for PC-Write that “prints” a PC-Write V2.71 document to a TeX-compatible disk file. It was written by Peter Flynn at University College, Cork, Republic of Ireland.

Wilfried Hennings’ FAQ, which deals specifically with conversions between TeX-based formats and word processor formats, offers much detail as well as tables that allow quick comparison of features.

A group at Ohio State University (USA) is working on a common document format based on SGML, with the ambition that any format could be translated to or from this one. FrameMaker provides “import filters” to aid translation from alien formats (presumably including TeX) to FrameMaker’s own.

excel2latex

support/excel2latex (or browse the directory)

pcwritex.arc

support/pcwritex (or browse the directory)

refer and tib tools

biblio/bibtex/utils/refer-tools (or browse the directory)

rnototex

support/rnototex (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

rtf2latex

support/rtf2latex (or browse the directory)

rtf2latex2e

support/rtf2latex2e (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

rtf2tex

support/rtf2tex (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

tex2rtf

support/tex2rtf (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

tr2latex

support/tr2latex (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

wd2latex

support/wd2latex (or browse the directory)

wp2latex

support/wp2latex (or browse the directory); catalogue entry

Word processor FAQ (source)

help/wp-conv (or browse the directory); catalogue entry