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 Plain Text is
Plain text here means columns lined up with spaces, the way a command line tool prints a table.
Terminal output, log files, fixed-width exports from older systems.
What changes when you convert LaTeX to Plain Text
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.
Columns are padded to the widest value. Width is counted in display columns rather than characters, so a table containing Chinese, Japanese or Korean text still lines up: those glyphs occupy two columns in a monospace font.
What carries over from LaTeX to Plain Text
LaTeX records 4 things about a table that plain text has no way to hold.
LaTeX can hold a value that is itself a list or an object. plain text has only flat cells, so nested values are flattened into one cell rather than being spread across columns.
A line break inside a cell ends the row in plain text, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.
plain text has no separate idea of a header, so the column names become an ordinary first row and nothing in the file marks them as different from the data.
Anything visual in the LaTeX - weight, alignment, colour, column widths - has no counterpart in plain text and is dropped. The values are what survives.
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.
The identifier 007 comes out of the Plain Text as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.
The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a Plain Text file goes wrong.
The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the Plain Text.