LaTeX to Markdown
Nothing you choose here leaves your browser, and nothing is downloaded to make it work — which for LaTeX means something specific, and the next section explains what.
Out of a paper and into a README, an issue or a wiki.
The common direction: something written for a journal or a thesis that now has to live somewhere plainer. What has a Markdown equivalent is carried across; maths, tables, citations and custom macros do not have one and are counted and reported rather than quietly dropped.
LaTeX is a programming language, and that changes what can be promised
Every other format on this site is markup: the
same characters always mean the same thing. LaTeX is a macro processor. A
document can say \newcommand{\thing}[1]{\textbf{#1}}
and from that line on \thing{x} means bold — a
meaning that exists nowhere but in that document. It can pull in other
files, redefine \section, or compute.
Nothing short of running TeX knows what an arbitrary document produces, and running TeX in a browser means downloading a TeX distribution: tens of megabytes, which is the one thing this site does not do. So this reads the commands people actually write, lists them below, and counts everything outside that list rather than dropping it quietly. That is a smaller promise than “converts LaTeX” and it is the one that is true.
Three things that are easy to get wrong
The document class decides the section
levels. In article there is no \chapter
and \section is the top level; in book and
report \chapter is the top and
\section sits below it. A converter with one fixed table
makes every book's chapters and sections the same size. The class is read
from \documentclass and the mapping follows it.
A percent sign starts a comment — unless it
is \%. And \\% starts one again,
because the first backslash escapes the second. Counting the backslashes in
front is the only way to tell, and a naive strip takes the rest of the line
off every escaped percent in the document — which in a paper full of
percentages is most of it.
An accent is a command.
\'e is é, \"o is ö,
\c{c} is ç. A reader that does not know them prints
the backslash and the letter separately, so every French or German document
arrives covered in stray apostrophes and quotation marks.
What is read, and what is not
Read: sectioning down to \subparagraph,
itemize, enumerate and description
lists, quote, verbatim and
lstlisting, \emph, \textbf,
\texttt and their relatives, \href and
\url, \includegraphics,
\footnote, \verb, the accent commands, the
dashes and quotation-mark ligatures, and the title and author from the
preamble.
Not read: mathematics — which is kept
as its own source in a marked block rather than rendered or deleted —
tables, whose cells are shown but whose structure is not
rebuilt, bibliographies and citations, and anything a package defines. A
custom macro cannot be expanded without running TeX, so
its uses keep their words and the number of definitions is reported.
\input and \include cannot be followed: the
other files are not here.
And there is no LaTeX to PDF. That is what TeX itself is for, and it is the one job that genuinely needs the whole distribution — fonts, hyphenation patterns, the lot. Overleaf or a local TeX install will do it properly.
Where to go next
- LaTeX to HTML — another way through
- Markdown to LaTeX — the other way round
- HTML to LaTeX — another way through