What LaTeX is
A LaTeX table is a tabular environment: a column specification, ampersands between cells and double backslashes at the end of each row.
Academic papers, theses and anything typeset with LaTeX or written in Overleaf.
What Avro Schema is
An Avro schema describes a record: its name and its typed fields. It is the contract, not the data.
Kafka pipelines and anything in the Hadoop family.
What changes when you convert LaTeX to Avro Schema
The tabular body is read, rules are dropped, and escaped characters are unescaped. Text wrapped in textbf or emph is reduced to the text itself.
Types are inferred per column from the values present. Any column with a gap in it becomes a union with null, because a reader rejects a record whose non-nullable field is missing.
What carries over from LaTeX to Avro Schema
LaTeX records 2 things about a table that Avro has no way to hold.
Avro wants a type for each column, and LaTeX does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.
Avro has no header row. The column names are repeated as keys on every record instead, which is why the result is bigger on disk than the table it came from.
Anything visual in the LaTeX - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in Avro and is dropped. The values are what survives.
The result can be read a record at a time, and appended to by adding to the end of it. That is worth having for a table too large to hold in memory, and it means a Avro file that is cut off part way through still gives you every record before the cut.
This is the direction that recovers structure: LaTeX has no table in it to read, only an arrangement that looks like one, so the rows and columns are inferred rather than read.