General ⇒ Plain text output?

[jkh107]

This is going to sound like a strange request, but does anybody know if there is a way of generating plain text output from Latex? Obviously, the input is in plain text but this includes a lot of markup. I would still like my section headings and lists numbered, and my bibliography generated at the end; I would just like the output to be in plain text format. Is there a way of doing this?

Thanks in advance.

[jkh107]

A similar but related question just occurred to me. Is it possible to use Bibtex without using Latex, for example, to generate a bibliography for a text file or an RTF file?

[klumpp]

As far as I know, LaTeX was designed to generate text which follows the rules of Typesetting. IMHO this excludes plain text.
But maybe I have an idea for a workaround:
Compile your LaTeX document with pdflatex and save it with Acrobat in plain text.

[DaveFromOz]

Import your LaTeX document into LyX.

You may need to massage the document a little. Some things like Title Pages don't get imported properly.

Once your document is looking as it should, export it from LyX to Plain Text. As far as possible, indenting and paragraph formatting is preserved (but not justified).

Alternatively, you can use LaTeX2rtf, available from http://latex2rtf.sourceforge.net/

This will give you a formatted RTF document that you can then import into another word processor, modify as you wish, or export as plain or formatted text.