Compiling LaTeX to text

Last updated on 2012-12-31 09:47 UTC UTC

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I needed to obtain a text copy of my Curriculum Vitae, which is typeset in LaTeX, for a site that doesn't allow to upload files, but only a text description. At first I searched for programs that compiled LaTeX sources to text directly, but I were disappointed by the results. Then I thought to search for programs that converted a PDF to text, and I found @pdftotext@, part of the "xpdf":http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf/ program. I run it with the command bc. pdftotext -enc UTF-8 .pdf

.txt and I was initially satisfied with the results. I later noticed that in some cases the layout was wrong -- especially when I crammed more information in one row. I then found about "detex":http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/detex and "opendetex":http://code.google.com/p/opendetex/, that simply strips LaTeX tags. I modified the opendetex sources in order to add a space when a right curly brace was encountered and the results now are more understandable. As an aside, I found an interesting program called "pandoc":http://johnmacfarlane.net/pandoc/ that could convert LaTeX to Markdown, but it doesn't support the specific command used by "moderncv":http://www.ctan.org/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/moderncv/

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