DETEX(1) General Commands Manual DETEX(1)
NAME
detex - a filter to strip TeX commands from a .tex file.
SYNOPSIS
detex [ -clnstw ] [ -e environment-list ] [ filename[.tex] ... ]
DESCRIPTION
Detex reads each file in sequence, removes all comments and TeX control
sequences and writes the remainder on the standard output. All text in
math mode and display mode is removed. By default, detex follows \in-
put commands. If a file cannot be opened, a warning message is printed
and the command is ignored. If the -n option is used, no \input or
\include commands will be processed. This allows single file process-
ing. If no input file is given on the command line, detex reads from
standard input.
If the magic sequence ``\begin{document}'' appears in the text, detex
assumes it is dealing with LaTeX source and detex recognizes additional
constructs used in LaTeX. These include the \include and \includeonly
commands. The -l option can be used to force LaTeX mode and the -t op-
tion can be used to force TeX mode regardless of input content.
Text in various environment modes of LaTeX is ignored. The default
modes are array, eqnarray, equation, longtable, picture, tabular and
verbatim. The -e option can be used to specify a comma separated envi-
ronment-list of environments to ignore. The list replaces the defaults
so specifying an empty list effectively causes no environments to be
ignored.
The -c option can be used in LaTeX mode to have detex echo the argu-
ments to \cite, \ref, and \pageref macros. This can be useful when
sending the output to a style checker.
Detex assumes the standard character classes are being used for TeX.
Detex allows white space between control sequences and magic characters
like `{' when recognizing things like LaTeX environments.
The -r option tries to naively replace $..$, $$..$$, \(..\) and \[..\]
with nouns and verbs (in particular, "noun" and "verbs") in a way that
keeps sentences readable.
If the -w flag is given, the output is a word list, one `word' (string
of two or more letters and apostrophes beginning with a letter) per
line, and all other characters ignored. Without -w the output follows
the original, with the deletions mentioned above. Newline characters
are preserved where possible so that the lines of output match the in-
put as closely as possible.
The -1 option will prefix each printed line with `filename:linenumber:`
indicating where that line is coming from in terms of the original
(La)TeX document.
The TEXINPUTS environment variable is used to find \input and \include
files. Like TeX, it interprets a leading or trailing `:' as the de-
fault TEXINPUTS. It does not support the `//' directory expansion
magic sequence.
Detex now handles the basic TeX ligatures as a special case, replacing
the ligatures with acceptable character substitutes. This eliminates
spelling errors introduced by merely removing them. The ligatures are
\aa, \ae, \oe, \ss, \o, \l (and their upper-case equivalents). The
special "dotless" characters \i and \j are also replaced with i and j
respectively.
Note that previous versions of detex would replace control sequences
with a space character to prevent words from running together. How-
ever, this caused accents in the middle of words to break words, gener-
ating "spelling errors" that were not desirable. Therefore, the new
version merely removes these accents. The old functionality can be es-
sentially duplicated by using the -s option.
SEE ALSO
tex(1)
DIAGNOSTICS
Nesting of \input is allowed but the number of opened files must not
exceed the system's limit on the number of simultaneously opened files.
Detex ignores unrecognized option characters after printing a warning
message.
AUTHOR
Originally written by Daniel Trinkle, Computer Science Department, Pur-
due University
Maintained by Piotr Kubowicz <https://github.com/pkubowicz/opendetex>.
BUGS
Detex is not a complete TeX interpreter, so it can be confused by some
constructs. Most errors result in too much rather than too little out-
put.
Running LaTeX source without a ``\begin{document}'' through detex may
produce errors.
Suggestions for improvements are (mildly) encouraged.
Purdue University 4 March 2021 DETEX(1)
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