Welcome to pylatexenc’s documentation!

[pylatexenc version: 3.0beta1] (What’s new?)

A simple LaTeX parser providing latex-to-unicode and unicode-to-latex conversion.

Quick example:

>>> from pylatexenc.latex2text import LatexNodes2Text
>>> latex = r"""\textbf{Hi there!} Here is \emph{an equation}:
... \begin{equation}
...     \zeta = x + i y
... \end{equation}
... where $i$ is the imaginary unit.
... """
>>> print(LatexNodes2Text().latex_to_text(latex))
𝐇𝐢 𝐭𝐡𝐞𝐫𝐞! Here is 𝑎𝑛 𝑒𝑞𝑢𝑎𝑡𝑖𝑜𝑛:

    ζ = 𝑥 + 𝑖𝑦

where 𝑖 is the imaginary unit.

The letters are written with the unicode mathematical alphanumeric characters, which is how \textbf{}, \emph{} and the variables of a formula are told apart in plain text. Those characters live in a high unicode plane that some fonts do not cover, and some uses (indexing, feeding another program) want plain ASCII anyway; LatexNodes2Text(text_fontstyle=False, math_fontstyle=False) keeps everything else and only leaves the letters alone, and LatexNodes2Text(math_mode='text') gives the plainer rendering that pylatexenc 2 produced.

And the other way around:

>>> from pylatexenc.latexencode import unicode_to_latex
>>> text = "À votre santé!"
>>> print(unicode_to_latex(text))
\`A votre sant\'e!

You can also use these utilities directly in command line, e.g.:

$ echo 'À votre santé!' | latexencode
\`A votre sant\'e!

Documentation

Which module do I want?

  • pylatexenc.latex2text — convert LaTeX code to plain (unicode) text. This is what you want if you have LaTeX and you’d like to read it, index it, or feed it to something that doesn’t understand LaTeX.

  • pylatexenc.latexencode — the other direction: convert unicode text into LaTeX code and escape sequences.

  • pylatexenc.latexwalker — parse LaTeX code into a tree of node objects, if you’d like to inspect or transform the LaTeX structure yourself.

  • pylatexenc.latexnodes and pylatexenc.macrospec — the lower-level parsing layer that the modules above are built on: node classes, the token reader, the library of parser objects, and the specifications that tell the parser how many arguments each macro or environment takes. Most users never need to touch these directly; you’ll come here when you want to teach the parser about macros it doesn’t know, or to write your own parser for a custom LaTeX construct.

The two command-line tools latex2text and latexencode expose the first two modules directly from your shell.

Contents:

Indices and tables