PARACODE(1)

💖 PARACODE(1) — the Unicode glow-up machine 💖

okay bestie, sit down, hydrate, and let me tell you about a lil command line tool called paracode 💅 she's a command line Unicode conversion tool and she is, genuinely, iconic.

✨ SYNOPSIS ✨

paracode [-t tables] string

🌸 DESCRIPTION 🌸

This manual page documents the paracode command. (yes, we're documenting the thing, in the page about the thing, we contain multitudes 🫶)

paracode exploits the full power of the Unicode standard to convert your text into a visually similar stream of glyphs, while using completely different codepoints. like, same vibe, different soul ✨ it is an excellent didactic tool demonstrating the principles and advanced use of the Unicode standard — so if you're learning Unicode, this is your girl, fr fr.

paracode is a command line tool working as a filter, reading standard input in UTF-8 encoding and writing to standard output. classic pipe girlie behaviour, we love a filter that just flows 🌊

💜 OPTIONS 💜

• -ttables --tablestables

Use given list of conversion tables, separated by a plus sign ➕

Special name 'all' selects all the tables.

⚠️ heads up bestie: selecting 'other', 'cyrillic_plus' and 'cherokee' tables (and 'all') makes use of rather esoteric characters, and not all fonts contain them. so like, your terminal might just go 💀 on some of them.

Special table 'mirror' uses quite different character substitution, is not selected automatically with 'all', and does not work well with anything except plain ascii alphabetical characters.

Example:

paracode -t cyrillic+greek+cherokee

paracode -t cherokee  <input >output

paracode -r -t mirror  <input >output

Possible tables are:

• cyrillic
• cyrillic_plus
• greek
• other
• cherokee
• all

• -r — display text in reverse order after conversion, best used together with -t mirror. 🪞 backwards AND different glyphs? that's a whole aesthetic, no cap.

👀 SEE ALSO 👀

• iconv(1)

🎀 AUTHOR 🎀

Radovan Garabík <garabik @ kassiopeia.juls.savba.sk> — king behaviour honestly 👑

and that's the whole page, bestie!! this one is from 2005-04-16, part of the General Commands Manual collection — a vintage icon, still slaying, still converting ✨💖 periodt.