Mearman 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:
- Decode phase: Known LaTeX commands (accents, ligatures, special chars) are decoded to Unicode
- 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.