As a preparation for a written qualifier I am soon to take as part of my PhD program, I had to write a research summary outlining what I have done so far. The point of the summary is to show your thesis committee what you have done.
Given that I had to embed the summary as plain text in an email to my thesis committee, I was thinking what to write it in. $latex \LaTeX$ seemed like an obvious choice because I write research works in it, but the outcome had to be plain text instead of the usual PDF format. Nevertheless, there is a way to get plain text out of a $latex \LaTeX$ document: convert the $latex \LaTeX$ source to HTML and then convert the HTML intermediate to plain text. There are readily available free software tools for both conversions: latex2html and html2text. If you are curious how to do it, check it out.
In case you are interested in the summary itself, go ahead and read it.