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From: gvr@cs.brown.edu (George V. Reilly)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: ASCII output from LaTeX
Message-ID: <58295@brunix.UUCP>
Date: 3 Dec 90 07:10:20 GMT
Sender: news@brunix.UUCP
Reply-To: gvr@cs.brown.edu (George V. Reilly)
Organization: Brown University Department of Computer Science
Lines: 50

I know that getting TeX/LaTeX to output ASCII is a recurring
topic in the TeX world, and I'm sorry to be the one to bring it
up again.  However, I've never been particularly interested in
the answer before now.

I have a 35-page LaTeX document that I need to be able to send
to people as a nicely formatted ASCII document.  Essentially,
I'm looking for an nroff to TeX's troff.  Sending the LaTeX
source isn't really an option.  Neither is sending the result of
filtering the LaTeX file through detex.

I found dvidoc on sun.soe.clarkson.edu in ~ftp/pub/tex/tex-programs,
and it goes someway towards addressing the problem.  Dvidoc is a
postprocessor for TeX DVI files that generates output for
character devices like terminals and line printers.
There is also a style file, dvidoc.sty, and a set of macros for
plain TeX, docmac.tex, which tell TeX to use a fixed-width
font everywhere.

Dvidoc works by placing characters on a page that's at most
132 x 88 (characters).  Naturally, there are rounding errors on
such a low-resolution page, and overprinting and spurious
blank lines occur.

I ran dvidoc on my paper, and had to spend most of an hour
fixing up the result: removing spurious blank lines, fixing
overprinting (only occurred with footnoterules), making the
section numbers in the table of contents legible (e.g., only the
first three letters of 11.3.1 appeared), similar problems with
footnotes, and fixing up the simple equations that appeared in
the paper.  In short, something I would be reluctant to do
again.

Some of these problems could be fixed by using a more
sophisticated style file: footnotes, table of contents,
line spacing, etc.  \bf and \it could be set up to
do Usenet-style highlighting: *bold* and _italic_
or nroff-style highlighting: bboolldd and _i_t_a_l_i_c.
Getting it to fix math would probably be incredibly hard;
enclosing the math in conditionals would probably
be the best way to get acceptable results in both
the high-resolution and ASCII versions.

So, has anybody out there got a better, more automatic
solution?  Or an augmented dvidoc.sty?

Email me and I'll post a summary of the responses.
________________
George V. Reilly   `Clumsy Carp'	gvr@cs.brown.edu   +1 (401) 863-7684
uunet!brunix!gvr   gvr@browncs.bitnet	Box 1910, Brown U, Prov, RI 02912