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NAME
dvi2tty - preview a TeX DVI file on an ordinary ASCII terminal
SYNOPSIS
dvi2tty [ options ] dvifile
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 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 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 (cf. 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 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. Valid 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 one 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 environment
variable 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 the dvi file.
-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 translate any characters (like the Scandinavian/latin1 mode)
except when running in tt-font.
-u Toggle option to process certain latin1 characters. Use this if your output devices
supports latin1 characters. Note this may interfere with -s. Best not to use -u
and -s together.
-s Toggle option to process the special Scandinavian characters that on most (?)
terminals in Scandinavia are mapped to ``{|}[\]''. Note this may interfere with
-u. Best not to use -u and -s together.
-J Auto detect NTT JTeX, ASCII pTeX, and upTeX dvi format.
-N Display NTT JTeX dvi.
-A Display ASCII pTeX dvi.
-U Display upTeX dvi.
-Eenc Set output Japanese encoding. The enc argument 'e', 's', 'j', and 'u' denotes EUC-
JP, Shift_JIS, ISO-2022-JP, and UTF-8, respectively.
-bdelim
Print the name of fonts when switching to it (and ending it). The delim argument is
used to delimit the fontname.
-h Show a help massage and exit successfully.
FILES
/bin/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
Original Pascal version: Svante Lindahl, Royal Institute of Technology, Stockholm
Improved C version: Marcel Mol, MESA Consulting
Now maintained at https://github.com/t-tk/dvi2tty/releases.
BUGS
Blanks between words get lost quite easily. 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.
1 May 2022 DVI2TTY(1)