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.

-c

Do not attempt to trnaslate any characters (like the Scandinavion mode) except when running in tt-font. -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.)

-bdelim

Print the name of fonts when switching to it (and ending it). The delim argument is used to delimit the fontname. -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.

TeX, dvi2ps

Svante Lindahl, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm

Improved C version: Marcel Mol

marcel@mesa.nl, MESA Consulting

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.