dvi2tty - preview a TeX DVI-file on an ordinary ascii terminal
dvi2tty [ options ] dvi-file
dvi2tty converts a TeX DVI-file to a format that is appropriate for
terminals and line printers. The program is intended to be used for
preliminary proofreading of TeX-ed documents. By default the output is
directed to the terminal, possibly through a pager (depending on how the
program was installed), but it can be directed to a file or a pipe.
The output leaves much to be desired, but is still useful if you
want to avoid walking to the laser printer (or whatever) for each iteration
of your document.
Since dvi2tty produces output for terminals and line printers the
representation of documents is naturally quite primitive. In principle Font
Changes are totally ignored, but dvi2tty recognizes a few
mathematical and special symbols that can be be displayed on an ordinary
ascii terminal, such as the '+' and '-' symbol.
If the width of the output text requires more columns than fits in
one line (c.f. the -w option) it is broken into several lines by
dvi2tty although they will be printed as one line on regular TeX
output devices (e.g. laser printers). To show that a broken line is really
just one logical line an asterisk (``*'') in the last position means that
the logical line is continued on the next physical line output by
dvi2tty. Such a continuation line is started with a a space and an
asterisk in the first two columns.
Options may be specified in the environment variable DVI2TTY. Any
option on the command line, conflicting with one in the environment, will
override the one from the environment.
Options:
- -o file
- Write output to file ``file''.
- -p list
- Print the pages chosen by list. Numbers refer to TeX-page numbers (known
as \count0). An example of format for list is ``1,3:6,8'' to choose pages
1, 3 through 6 and 8. Negative numbers can be used exactly as in TeX, e g
-1 comes before -4 as in ``-p-1:-4,17''.
- -P list
- Like -p except that page numbers refer to the sequential ordering of the
pages in the dvi-file. Negative numbers don't make a lot of sense
here...
- -w n
- Specify terminal width n. Legal range 16-132. Default is 80. If
your terminal has the ability to display in 132 columns it might be a good
idea to use -w132 and toggle the terminal into this mode as output will
probably look somewhat better.
- -v
- Specify height of lines. Default value 450000. Allows to adjust
linespacing.
- -q
- Don't pipe the output through a pager. This may be the default on some
systems (depending on the whims of the person installing the
program).
- -e n
- This option can be used to influence the spacing between words. With a
negative value the number of spaces between words becomes less, with a
positive value it becomes more. -e-11 seems to worked well.
- -f
- Pipe through a pager, $PAGER if defined, or whatever the installer of the
program compiled in (often ``more''). This may be the default, but it is
still okay to redirect output with ``>'', the pager will not be used if
output is not going to a terminal.
- -F
- Specify the pager program to be used. This overrides the $PAGER and the
default pager.
- -Fprog
- Use ``prog'' as program to pipe output into. Can be used to choose an
alternate pager (e g ``-Fless'').
- -t
- \tt fonts were used (instead of cm) to produce dvi file. (screen.sty is a
powerfull mean to do that with LaTeX).
- -a
- Dvi2tty normally tries to output accented characters. With the -a option,
accented characters are output without the accent sign.
- -l
- Mark page breaks with the two-character sequence ``^L''. The default is to
mark them with a form-feed character.
- -u
- Don't make any attempts to find special Scandinavian characters. If such
characters are in the text they will map to ``a'' and ``o''. This is
probably the default outside of Scandinavia. (The installer makes this
decision when the program is installed.)
- -s
- Try to find the special Scandinavian characters that on most (?) terminals
in Scandinavia are mapped to ``{|}[\]''. This can be the default, and
output from files not containing these special characters will be
identical regardless of this option.
/usr/ucb/more probably the default pager.
PAGER
the pager to use.
DVI2TTY
can be set to hold command-line options.
Svante Lindahl, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
Improved C version: Marcel Mol
{seismo, mcvax}!enea!ttds!zap
marcel@duteca.et.tudelft.nl
Blanks between words get lost quite easy. This is less likely if you are using a
wider output than the default 80.
Only one file may be specified on the command line.