DVI2TTY(Local)DVI2TTY(Local)NAME
dvi2tty - preview a TeX DVI-file on an ordinary ascii terminal
SYNOPSIS
dvi2tty [ options ] dvi-file
DESCRIPTION
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 rep‐
resentation of documents is naturally quite primitive. In principle
Font Changes are totally ignored, but dvi2tty recognizes a few mathe‐
matical 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 num‐
bers (known as \count0). An example of format for list is
``1,3:6,8'' to choose pages 1, 3 through 6 and 8. Negative num‐
bers 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 order‐
ing 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 in‐
staller 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.
FILES
/usr/ucb/more probably the default pager.
ENVIRONMENT
PAGER the pager to use.
DVI2TTY can be set to hold command-line options.
SEE ALSO
TeX, dvi2ps
AUTHOR
Svante Lindahl, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
Improved C version: Marcel Mol
{seismo, mcvax}!enea!ttds!zap
marcel@duteca.et.tudelft.nl
BUGS
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.
13 November 1990 DVI2TTY(Local)
