TED(1)

🎀 TED(1) — General Commands Manual 🎀

Okay bestie, this is the manual page for Ted — yes, that Ted. 💖

✨ NAME ✨

Ted — an easy rich text processor (RTF file editor)

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

Interactive calls as a GUI text processor:

Ted [ settings ] [ filename-1 ] [ filename-2 .....  ]

Special command-line calls:

Ted [ settings ] --command [ arg-1 .....  ] [ arg-2 .....  ]

💫 DESCRIPTION 💫

Ted is an easy rich text processor (RTF file editor) with a graphic user interface. For more information, see the users' manual (details below). Besides that, Ted is a utility to convert RTF files to various formats. One of its goals is to make it possible to produce decent looking documents avoiding the pain of antiquated packages like nroff that I had to use to type this man page. 😭

📥 Ted can read the following file formats 📥

Documents can be read from files or from standard input. Ted only reads from standard input in calls that consume one single input document — like a file, a pipe, or what you type as a proficient RTF guru. 🧚

• rtf — Rich Text Files with extension *.rtf or -rtf- for standard input.
• txt — Plain Text Files with extension *.txt or -txt- for standard input. The encoding of the text file is assumed to be UTF-8. To open files with a different encoding, use the iconv command.

📤 Ted can write the following file formats 📤

Documents can be written to files or to standard output.

• rtf — Rich Text Files with extension *.rtf or -rtf- for standard output.
• txt — Plain Text files with extension *.txt or -txt- for standard output. The encoding of the text file is UTF-8. To save files with a different encoding, use the iconv command. If Ted saves a document to plain text, it discards all formatting and all illustrations.
• html — Hypertext Markup Language files with extension *.html or -html- for standard output. If Ted saves HTML to standard output, it discards all images and all embedded objects.
• eml — HTML Mail message format (rfc 2557) files with extension *.eml or -eml- for standard output. The output can be piped into ssmtp or mailx as a HTML formatted mail message.
• epub — EPUB e-book files with extension *.epub or -epub- for standard output. The document is saved in the EPUB electronic book format that is supported by most e-readers and tablets.
• ps — PostScript files with extension *.ps or -ps- for standard output. The output can be printed or converted to PDF.
• svg — Scalable Vector Graphics files with extension *.svg or -svg- for standard output. The output can be used as an illustration.
• pdf — Portable Document Format files with extension *.pdf or -pdf- for standard output. The output can be viewed with the Adobe Acrobat reader or compatible programs. Ted uses GhostScript (ps2pdf and gs) to convert PostScript to pdf.

🔥 COMMAND LINE CALLS 🔥

• Ted — show the initial window with menu options to open files and to exit Ted.
• Ted doc1.rtf doc2.txt .. — open the documents on the command line.
• Ted --Find pattern f1.rtf f2.txt — open the files on the command line and search for pattern.
• Ted --RegFind pattern f1.rtf f2.txt — open the documents on the command line and search for pattern. Pattern is a regular expression. Ted uses the pcre regular expression matching library by Philip Hazel. For documentation see http://www.pcre.org. (Please realize that the casual user does not need to use or understand regular expressions.)
• Ted --TtfToAfm x.ttf y.afm — make an afm file that describes a true type font. This can be practical when you manually configure fonts for Ted.
• Ted --RtfToPs < x.rtf > y.ps — obsolete invocation: use --printToFile. -rtf- -ps-
• Ted --RtfToPsPaper A4 < x.rtf > y.ps — obsolete invocation: use --printToFilePaper. -rtf- -ps- A4
• Ted --version — show the version of Ted.
• Ted --platform — show the platform for which Ted was built.
• Ted --build — show the host and the date where Ted was built.
• Ted --fullVersion — show version, platform and build.
• Ted --saveTo f1.rtf f2.txt — read a file and save it. (in a different supported format) Supported formats are *.txt *.rtf and *.html. As Ted writes relatively readable rtf, this can be used as a kind of rtf pretty-printer.
• Ted --printToFile x.rtf y.ps — convert a document to PostScript. Format for the default paper format. Use -rtf- for the document name to read the document from standard input. Use -ps- as output name to emit PostScript to standard output. This call is used by the rtf2pdf.sh script. If you use the script from an internet scripting tool like PHP, make sure that both Ted and gs are in the PATH. Note that this produces ps files with Ted's default paper size.
• Ted --printToFilePaper x.rtf y.ps A4 — convert a document to PostScript. Format for the paper size given. Refer to --printToFile for IO redirections. Note that this produces ps files with the given paper size.
• Ted --print x.rtf — print the document on the default printer. Format for the default paper size.
• Ted --printPaper x.rtf a4 — print the document on the default printer. Format for the paper size given.
• Ted --printToPrinter x.rtf lp1 — print the document on the printer given. Format for the default paper size.
• Ted --printToPrinterPaper x.rtf lp1 letter — print the document on the printer given. Format for the paper size given.
• Ted --setProperty property value .... — see below 👇
• Ted --FontsDocuments /tmp/fontsdocs — create a directory and for every font that Ted knows about, store a document with all the symbols in the font. This is excellent testing material. It can also be used to view the fonts. The checkfontsdocs.sh job can be used to check whether the documents are correctly handled.
• Ted --GSFontmapForFiles — emit a fragment for a GhostScript Fontmap file. The shapes are:

Ted --GSFontmapForFiles `pwd`/*.ttf
Ted --GSFontmapForFiles `pwd`/*.pfb

The second and subsequent arguments are *.ttf, *.pfa or *.pfb file names. It always—actually always—makes sense to use absolute font file names: GhostScript needs to know where to look for the fonts.

• Ted --AfmForFontFiles — create an afm file for all *.pfa, *.pfb, *.ttf files on the command line:

Ted --AfmForFontFiles `pwd`/*.ttf

Note that to run the command, you need to have writing permission to the Ted afm directory, or at least in the localfonts subdirectory. Also note that you need to run the command with a umask that gives the generated afm files the correct permissions (022). The ++AfmForFontFiles variant tries to leave information in the AFM files on how to match X11 fonts to the fonts. With recent versions of Ted that use fontconfig, that is not really relevant.

✨ OPTIONS ✨

Ted supports the following configuration options. Default values are compiled into the Ted executable program. Ted searches for values in the following locations: (1) The command line, (2) ${HOME}/Ted.properties (3) /share/Ted/Ted-${LOCALE}.properties, (4) /share/Ted/Ted.properties. Unknown (or misspelled) properties are silently ignored. Use the --property=value or the --setProperty property value syntax on the command line. 💅

• magnification — magnification for drawing documents on the screen. The default value is 100%. The alternative format 1.0 for 100% is also supported. It has the disadvantage that it depends on the decimal sign of the current locale. (E.G: 1,2 for 120% in Western Europe.) Very small and very big values are ignored. 100% magnification translates to 96 DPI on screen.
• unit — the unit that is used by default. This property influences the appearance of the ruler and the interpretation of numbers entered in the format tool. Possible values are: inch, ", cm, mm, points, pt, picas, pi. The default is inch.
• paper — the format of the paper in the printer. The paper format is also used as the default page size for new documents. If a smaller page size is used for a document, Ted uses the Ted.paper property to print in the upper left corner of the paper. Possible values are: a4,a5,letter,legal,executive and strings in the form <Width> x <Height> or <Width> x <Height> <Unit> where <Width> and <Height> are numbers. Values for units are given above. If <Unit> is omitted, the value of the unit property is assumed. Plain text files do not store a paper size for the file inside the file. The Ted.paper property is used for the page layout of every plain text file that Ted opens. Note that Ted uses the file /etc/papersize to find a default paper format. The default format can be overridden with any of the configuration mechanisms.
• leftMargin, topMargin, rightMargin, bottomMargin — the default width of the page margins. The format is <Width> or <Width> <Unit>. <Width> is a number. <Unit> is one of the units mentioned above. The default unit is the value of unit above.
• defaultPrinter — if you want to use a different printer than the system default printer as the default printer from Ted, you can set this property to select that printer the first time you use the Print Dialog. The value is the name of a printer. Use the same names that you use in the lp -d somePrinter, or the lpr -P somePrinter commands.
• afmDirectory — the directory where Ted looks for font metric files. Ted only uses font metric files if fontconfig is disabled. Without fontconfig, only fonts that have a metric file in this directory can be used by Ted. In a default installation, metric files are expected in /share/Ted/afm. This property is particularly useful when you cannot install Ted as root, and hence you have to store the metric files in some private directory. You can also make the afmDirectory point to the GhostScript fonts directory. E.G. to /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts. Refer to the section on adding fonts for more details. Use the gs -h command to find the exact location of the GhostScript afm files.
• spellToolSystemDicts — the directory where Ted looks for spelling dictionaries. In a default installation, spelling dictionaries are expected in /share/Ted/dfa. This property is particularly useful when you cannot install Ted as root, and hence you have to store the dictionaries in some private directory.
• documentFileName — the name of this online document file. In a default installation this is /share/Ted/TedDocument-en_US.rtf.
• customPrintCommand — a command to print through a custom printer command. Refer to the paragraph on printing for details.
• customPrinterName — the name that is used to designate the custom printer command on the Print Dialog. Refer to the paragraph on printing for details.
• customPrintCommand2, customPrinterName2 — bestie, this is how you configure a second custom printer. Two printers, no drama. 💅
• printDialogShowPlacementDrawing — some laptops have microscopic screens 😭. Setting this property to 0 hides the little diagram that shows where the document pages land on the sheets of paper. It makes the dialog way shorter so it actually fits on screens like that.
• showTableGrid — by default Ted draws a grid to show the structure of tables that don’t have borders. Set this to 0 and boom, no grid. ✨
• fontDirectory — the directory where Ted looks for fonts to include (embed) in its printed documents. Peep the section on adding fonts for more details. Use the gs -h command to find the exact value. This property is only used on traditional UNIX systems that do not use fontconfig. AFM files generated by Ted have a Ted-specific comment that gives the font file name, so this property only matters if neither fontconfig nor Ted-generated AFM files are being used. 🎀
• usePostScriptFilters — PostScript levels 2 and 3 support filters, and filters let images in a PostScript file be coded way more efficiently. You can turn this off if your printer doesn’t support level 2 filters and the /FlateDecode filter. Recent versions of GhostScript support both. If you cannot print all images, deactivate this setting — set the value to 0.
• usePostScriptIndexedImages — PostScript level 2 has a variant of the image operator that lets images use color indirection via a palette inside the PostScript file. Since lots of images in rtf documents are this kind, setting this property can help reduce the volume of PostScript sent to the printer. All level 2 implementations, including GhostScript, support indexed images. If you cannot print all images, deactivate this setting — set the value to 0.
• customPsSetupFilename — the name of a PostScript file used for special printer setup and configuration. The contents of that file get inserted as part of the Setup section of the PostScript output. 🛠️
• skipBlankPages — if this parameter is set to 1, Ted skips blank pages while printing. Pages that are completely empty will not be printed. If the document has headers and footers, the relevant headers and footers will be printed on the page, and the page will not be blank. 🫶
• skipEmptyPages — if this parameter is set to 1, Ted skips empty pages while printing. Pages that are completely empty will not be printed. A page is not considered empty if it actually is empty but the document has headers and footers. Under many circumstances the page would contain a header and a footer, and it will be printed.
• omitHeadersOnEmptyPages — if this parameter is set to 1, Ted will not print page headers and footers on pages that contain no text from the document body or from notes. By design, this property interacts with skipEmptyPages and skipBlankPages in the following surprising way: if both omitHeadersOnEmptyPages and skipBlankPages are set, a page without any body content will not be printed at all. However, if both omitHeadersOnEmptyPages and skipEmptyPages are set, a page without any body content will be printed as an empty page. Plot twist, bestie. 😭
• findToolExplicitFocus — tells the find tool to get keyboard focus when you activate it. Usually that’s desirable. But some window managers make Ted crash when it tries to manipulate keyboard focus, so you can set findToolExplicitFocus to 0 to tell Ted not to move keyboard focus to the find tool and avoid those problems. 🧚
• autoHyphenate — if a word in a line of text is wider than the width allocated for the paragraph, Ted makes that word protrude beyond the right margin. Set autoHyphenate to 1 and Ted will automatically insert optional hyphens (-) to fold the word. In general this is undesirable behavior. Only set this on the command line, and only if you use Ted to format documents. If autoHyphenate is set while you’re editing documents, those optional hyphens will end up in completely arbitrary locations. Not cute. 💀
• avoidFontconfig — if Ted was compiled to use fontconfig and freetype, setting this option to 1 tells Ted not to use fontconfig or freetype. It falls back to afm files and plain X11 text rendering. Turning off fontconfig has the disadvantage that fewer fonts are available and text looks far worse on screen. For rtf to PostScript/PDF conversion, it has the advantage that Ted is less dependent on the environment and documents that use standard fonts are formatted even more similar to what MS-Word does. 🌈
• preferBase35Fonts — if Ted was compiled to use fontconfig and freetype, setting this option to 1 tells Ted not to use fontconfig to get the list of fonts. It uses the Adobe collection of 35 core PostScript fonts instead. Turning off fontconfig has the disadvantage that fewer fonts are available. The advantage is that documents you make only use a set of widely supported standard fonts. 👑
• embedFonts — if Ted knows the name and location of font files on the file system, it will embed the fonts in its printout. Advantage: generated PostScript prints identically on all printers. Disadvantage: files are bigger and possibly print slower. Set this property to 0 and Ted will not embed any fonts in its printout. 📦
• useKerning — if set to 0, Ted ignores kerning information in the afm files. That makes Ted start a little faster. The name suggests that otherwise Ted will use kerning, but that is not the case. The current version of Ted will never produce kerned output. The pretentious name was chosen because it’s simple and can be used in the future for what it actually suggests. Ngl, iconic naming choice. 💅
• shadingMeshTwips — the rtf file format supports 12 patterns that can be used as a background in the document. A shading can be applied to table cells, paragraphs, and even separate pieces of text. Though Ted doesn’t support shading patterns in the user interface, it does when you print a document, or when you convert existing documents with shading to a file to convert them to Acrobat PDF. For printing, fine patterns are preferable to coarse ones; for PDF files you want to view on screen, coarse patterns are preferable. That’s why the default value of 3 points for the grain of the pattern is often undesirable. With this parameter you can set the distance between the lines that make up the shading. The value is the distance between the lines in twips. Sensible values are between 10 and 100 twips (0.5 and 5 points). 🎨
• lenientRtf — in normal operation, Ted performs elementary checks on the validity of rtf files, e.g. it checks whether the braces in the rtf file match. Set this property to 1 and the checks are much more lenient, and Ted will try to open files that are syntactically incorrect. 🙈
• traceEdits — in normal operation, Ted keeps a trace of your editing actions. Ted uses the trace file to remember the info it needs to execute Undo and Repeat actions. The trace is also used to recover your work after a crash. If you set traceEdits to 0, Ted will not make a trace — and this also deactivates the Undo, Repeat, and Recover actions. ⚠️
• pdfOutline — by default, Ted inserts pdfmarks in the PostScript it issues so you get an outline when the PostScript is converted to Acrobat PDF. Set this value to 0 if you do not want an outline. 🦋

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🐛 BUGS 🐛

It can take a minute to start — before the Ted window appears on the display — because Ted polls the system printers. Iconic but slow. 😭

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📁 FILES 📁

• /share/Ted — the directory with architecture-independent files for Ted
• /usr/bin/Ted — the Ted executable program
• /share/Ted/Ted.properties — the system-wide configuration file for Ted
• /share/Ted/TedDocument-en_US.rtf — the Ted help document
• /share/Ted/dfa/*.dfa — spell check dictionaries
• /share/Ted/Ted-*.properties — localized texts for the user interface plus localized settings
• /share/Ted/TedDocument-*.rtf — localized Ted documents; they must be configured in the /share/Ted/Ted-*.properties files
• ${HOME}/.Ted.properties — private configuration for Ted 💖

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👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• “Ted, an easy rich text processor”, Mark de Does, http://www.nllgg.nl/Ted/ 2003 .. 2012.
• The Ted users’ manual that is accessible through Ted’s Help menu.
• rtf2pdf(1), rtf2ps(1)

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✍️ AUTHOR ✍️

A draft manual page was started by John A. Murdie, Department of Computer Science, University of York.

This version is composed and maintained by Mark de Does. 👑

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💖 Footer sign-off, bestie: Mark de Does, TED(1) — plus the date that’s printed in the footer. That’s the whole source/version-and-date moment, and it’s lowkey iconic. 💅✨