---
myst:
  html_meta:
    keywords: LaTeX,conversion,format DVI"
---
# 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 development seems to have stopped before the authors were willing to declare the work complete.

A common problem is the hyphenation that TeX inserts when typesetting something : since the output is inevitably viewed using fonts that don't match the original, the hyphenation usually looks silly.

Ralph Droms provides a <ctanpkg:txt> bundle of things in support of ASCII generation, but it doesn't do a good job with tables and mathematics.

Another possibility is to use the LaTeX-to-ASCII conversion program, <ctanpkg: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](faquk:FAQ-LaTeX2HTML), and then to use a browser such as `lynx` to dump the resulting HTML as plain text.

:::{sources}
[Conversion from (La)TeX to plain text](faquk:FAQ-toascii)
:::