g3cat(1)

🦋 g3cat — bestie, let's talk about gluing fax pages together 🦋

okay so this one's from the mgetty+sendfax manual, and it's genuinely one of my faves because it does one thing and does it flawlessly. it's g3cat(1), and she concatenates. that's the whole personality. 💖

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✨ NAME ✨

g3cat — concatenate multiple g3 documents. yeah. she takes your g3 files and she stacks them. no cap.

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🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

g3cat [-l] [-a] g3-file1 ...

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💜 DESCRIPTION 💜

so g3cat concatenates g3 files, fr fr. and those files can be either:

• 'raw' — like, bitmaps packed according to the CCITT T.4 standard for one-dimensional bitmap encoding, iykyk
• 'digifax' — the ones created by GNU's GhostScript package with the digifax drivers

her output is a concatenation of all the input files, in raw G3 format, with two white lines in between. cute, right?

if you hand her a - as an input file, she reads from stdin. iconic behaviour honestly.

⚠️ and listen — if the input data is malformed, a warning gets printed to stderr, and the output file will have a blank line at that place. she's not gonna crash on you, she's just gonna leave a lil gap and keep going. 💅

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🎀 OPTIONS 🎀

• -l — separate files with a one-pixel wide black line. yes, literally one pixel. she's precise like that.
• -h <blank lines> — specifies the number of blank lines g3cat should prepend to each page. default is 0.
• -L <lines> — limit the length of the output page to maximum <lines> lines.

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💅 SPECIAL-CASE OPTIONS 💅

these ones are lowkey the main character energy options, ngl.

• -w <width> — specifies the desired page width in pixels per line. default is 1728 PELs, and this is mandatory if you want to send the fax to a standard fax machine. and if one of the input files doesn't match this line width (for example because it was created by a broken G3 creator 🙈), a warning is printed, and the line width is transparently fixed. she fixes it. quietly. slay.
• -a — byte-align the end-of-line codes (EOL) in the file. every EOL will end at a byte boundary, that is, with a 01 byte.
• -p <pad> — specifies a minimum number of bytes that each output line must be padded to. padding is done with 0-bits before the EOL code.
• -R — suppress output of end-of-page code (RTC).

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⭐ Example ⭐

the following example will put a header line on a given g3 page, 'page1', and put the result into 'page2':

echo '$header' | pbmtext | pbm2g3 | g3cat - page1 >page2

like, look at that pipeline. art. 🎨

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🧚 FILES 🧚

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😭 BUGS 😭

Hopefully none :-).

(her words, not mine. she's confident. we love that for her. 👑)

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🔥 SEE ALSO 🔥

g32pbm(1), sendfax(8), faxspool(1)

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🫶 AUTHORS 🫶

g3cat is Copyright (C) 1993 by Gert Doering, <gert@greenie.muc.de>

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okay that's the whole page bestie, and before you go — this lil masterpiece came from greenie, dated 27 Oct 93, and it lives under the name g3cat(1) in the mgetty+sendfax manual. periodt. 💖✨🦋