LaTeX Command Stripper

Extract plain text from LaTeX documents by removing all commands and formatting.

Usage

npx tsx scripts/strip.ts [options] <text-or-file>

Options

• --file - Read input from file instead of command line argument
• --output <file> - Write output to file
• --keep-structure - Preserve paragraph breaks and spacing

Examples

Strip formatting commands

npx tsx scripts/strip.ts "\\textbf{Bold} and \\emph{italic} text"
# Output: Bold and italic text

Strip nested commands

npx tsx scripts/strip.ts "\\textbf{\\emph{nested}}"
# Output: nested

Extract plain text from file

npx tsx scripts/strip.ts --file paper.tex --output plain.txt

Strip LaTeX with Unicode conversion

npx tsx scripts/strip.ts "M\\\"{\u}ller wrote \\textit{many papers}"
# Output: Müller wrote many papers

What Gets Stripped

• Formatting commands: \textbf, \emph, \textit, \underline
• Font commands: \textrm, \textsf, \texttt
• Size commands: \large, \small, \tiny
• Nested commands: Recursively removes all levels of nesting
• Escaped characters: Converts \& → &, \% → %, etc.

What Gets Preserved

• Text content: All readable text is preserved
• Accented characters: LaTeX accents are decoded to Unicode
• Whitespace: Single spaces are preserved and normalized

Technical Details

The stripper works in two phases:

1. Decode phase: Known LaTeX commands (accents, ligatures, special chars) are decoded to Unicode
2. Strip phase: Remaining formatting commands are removed iteratively to handle nesting

Commands are removed using pattern matching: \command{content} → content

Extra whitespace is normalized to single spaces, and leading/trailing whitespace is trimmed.