Matlab’s TeX support in figure windows is great for displaying information in a visually appealing way. However, many of the TeX elements just get in the way when displaying a label string in the command window and lead to lots of additional gibberish if you want to create a valid variable name from the TeX string using genvarname.

Given the TeX string as an input, return a string that contains only the plain text of what would be displayed in a figure window by title, xlabel, etc.

Retain special characters, e.g., ‘\beta’ becomes ‘beta’.

Cell array inputs should return multi-line strings.