Table of contents


NAME

detex - a filter to strip TeX commands from a .tex file.

SYNOPSIS

detex [-?] [-a] [-c] [-e envlist] [-h] [-l] [-m] [-n] [-s] [-v] [-w] [filename[.tex] ...]

DESCRIPTION

detex reads each file in sequence, and removes all comments, all TeX control sequences, and all text in inline math mode and display math mode, and writes the remainder on the standard output.

By default, detex follows \input commands. If a file cannot be opened, a warning message is printed and the command is ignored.

If no input files are given on the command line, detex reads from standard input.

detex assumes the standard character classes (category codes) are being used for TeX, and it allows white space between control sequences and magic characters like `{' when recognizing things like LaTeX environments.

The TEXINPUTS environment variable is used to find \input and \include files.


OPTIONS

Command-line options are single letters, and letter case is ignored. For compatibility with GNU and POSIX conventions, options may be introduced by either a single or a double hyphen: -v and --v are equivalent.

Multiple single-letter options can be collapsed into a single multiletter option: -a -c -l and -acl are equivalent.

To avoid confusion with options, if a filename begins with a hyphen, it must be disguised by a leading absolute or relative directory path, e.g. /tmp/-foo.tex or ./-foo.tex.

-?
Display a brief help message on stderr, and then exit immediately with a success status code (0 on UNIX).
-a
Display an author credit on stderr, and then exit immediately with a success status code (0 on UNIX).
-c
In LaTeX mode, echo the arguments to \cite, \ref, and \pageref macros; they are otherwise normally discarded. This option can be useful when sending the output to a style checker.

Besides \cite, detex also recognizes the authordate1-4, chicago, and harvard citation command variants: \altcite, \citeA, \citeANP, \citeN, \citeNP, \citeyear, \citeyearNP, \fullcite, \fullciteA, \pageref, \ref, \shortcite, and \shortciteA.

-e envlist
Text in various environments of LaTeX is ignored. The default ignored environments are align, alignat, array, eqnarray, equation, figure, gather, multline, picture, table and verbatim. The -e option can be used to specify a comma-separated list of environments to ignore. The list replaces the defaults, so specifying an empty list effectively prevents all environments from being ignored.
-h
Display a brief help message on stderr, and then exit immediately with a success status code (0 on UNIX).
-l
detex normally assumes that it is dealing with plain TeX, or a variant such as extended plain TeX, or AmSTeX. However, if the magic sequence \begin{document} appears in the text, or an Emacs-style mode comment
% -*-LaTeX-*-
is found, or the input file has a .ltx extension, then detex assumes it is dealing with LaTeX source and it recognizes additional constructs used in LaTeX. These include the \include and \includeonly commands. The -l option can be used to force LaTeX mode, which is useful if the input files would not otherwise be recognized as LaTeX files.

An Emacs-style mode comment

% -*-TeX-*-
turns off LaTeX mode.
-m
Instead of completely discarding math mode, citation, and cross-reference text, mark their presence by a single word [CITE], [LABEL], [MATH], [PAGEREF], or [REF]. This is useful when the output is filtered by the doubled-word utility, dw(1), because it reduces the number of bogus warnings.
-n
Ignore \input and \include commands. This allows processing of a file without examining its subsidiary files.
-s
Older versions of detex would replace control sequences with a space character to prevent words from running together. However, this caused accents in the middle of words to break words, generating `spelling errors' that were not desirable. The -s option requests the old functionality.
-v
Print a version number and date on stderr, and then exit immediately with a success status code (0 on UNIX).
-w
Output 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, apart with the deletions mentioned elsewhere. Newline characters are preserved where possible so that the lines of output match the input as closely as possible. This helps relate line-numbered warning and error messages back to the original source files when other tools are applied to detex's output.


DIAGNOSTICS

Nesting of \input commands 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.


ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES

TEXINPUTS
TeX input directory search path. This is a colon-separated list of directories to search for \input and \include files that lack a directory prefix.

FILES

detex requires no additional files beyond those named on its command line.

SEE ALSO

dw(1), emacs(1) lacheck(1), tex(1).

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, output.

Running LaTeX source without a \begin{document} through detex may produce errors.

Suggestions for improvements are encouraged.


AUTHOR

Daniel Trinkle
Department of Computer Science
Purdue University
1398 Computer Science Building
West Lafayette, IN 47907-1398
USA

Email: [email protected]
WWW URL: http://www.cs.purdue.edu/people/trinkle