Re: getting out of LaTeX

On Fri, 18 Aug 2006 05:28:26 -0700, Peter T. Daniels wrote:

I'm translating a linguistics article from German, and I don't want to
retype all the examples from the language under discussion, but the author
provided not a Word (or similar) file, but a pdf out of LaTeX, and the
author is now telling the volume editor that he therefore can't provide a
word processor text of the examples.

Can this be true?

Of course not.

Is it not possible to save a LaTeX document in a format readable by
another program?

It is perfectly possible.

If so, this is an enormously serious drawback to the system, even more so
than the having-to-program-every-format-change drawback.

Peter, when are you going to take the trouble to learn just a little
bit of TeX/LaTeX, and thus stop making a fool of yourself when, from your
deep ignorance of this system, you criticize it at every possible
opportunity?

TeX/LaTeX files are saved as text files - so that you can edit them
with any simple text editor. If the stuff that you are interested in was
indeed typeset with LaTeX, the examples should be available as ASCII text
(unless they were originally in some sort of graphics format imported into
LaTeX, that is).

.