VILISTEXTUM(1)

✨ VILISTEXTUM 💖 — like, the html → ascii glow-up tool

okay bestie, so this is the manual page for vilistextum, and it lives in section 1 of the manual (the "general commands" section, iykyk). it's a whole vibe, let's get into it 🦋

---

🌸 NAME 🌸

vilistextum — html to ascii converter ✨

---

🎀 SYNOPSIS 🎀

vilistextum [OPTIONS] [inputfile |-] [outputfile | -]

---

💅 DESCRIPTION 💅

so vilistextum is a html to ascii converter, but here's the tea: it was specifically programmed to get the best out of incorrect html. like, messy html? broken html? html that's giving chaos? she eats it up, no cap 🔥

---

👑 OPTIONS 👑

• inputfile,- resp. outputfile,- — swap out inputfile for - and she'll read from standard input instead. same energy for outputfile — use - and everything gets written to standard output 🫶
• -a, --no-alt — don't output anything at all for IMG tags, even the ones that DO have an ALT attribute. ngl this implies --no-image too.
• -c, --convert-tags — some tags get converted into special characters ✨
• -e, --errorlevel NUMBER — cranks up how chatty the error messages are. (0: literally no error messages, silence era 💀)
• -i, --defimage STRING — IMG tags that don't have an alt attribute get output as [STRING].
• -l, --links — numbers every link in the document and makes little footnotes for each one at the end of the file. academic baddie behaviour 📚
• -k, --links-inline — prints the links right after the html tag instead.
• -m, --dont-convert-characters — don't convert the entities from windows1252 (€-Ÿ and their proper entity names).
• -n, --no-image — don't output [Image] for IMG tags that have no ALT attribute.
• -p, --palm — outputs the text in a way that's more suitable for reading on a PDA 📱 throwback fr fr
• -r, --remove-empty-alt — if there's an empty ALT attribute in an IMG tag (eg <IMG href="..." alt="">), don't output []. we're not doing empty brackets today 💅
• -s, --shrink-lines [NUMBER] — if there are more than NUMBER empty lines, only output NUMBER of them. Default: 1.
• -t, --no-title — don't output the title.
• -w, --width NUMBER — maximum line width.
• -h, --help — display this help and exit 🫶
• -v, --version — output version information and exit ⭐

---

🌈 MULTIBYTE OPTIONS 🌈

heads up bestie: these are only available if compiled with multibyte support. no multibyte build, no vibes.

• -u, --output-utf-8 — instead of using the character set of the html document, everything gets output as utf-8. iconic encoding choice, honestly ✨
• -x, --translit — uses the //TRANSLIT feature of libiconv. go consult the iconv manual for the details, she's got the lore 📖
• -y, --charset CHARSET — if the HTML document doesn't provide a character set in the meta tags, use CHARSET instead. backup plan energy 💖

---

😭 LIMITATIONS 😭

look, nobody's perfect, and we keep it real here:

• The rendering of tables is not very good. 💀
• The handling of OL is incomplete. The program treats it as UL and more than 10 nested lists confuse it. (ten levels deep?? babe, that's a lot, even for her 🙈)
• Text is never justified.

---

🐛 REPORTING BUGS 🐛

Please report bugs to <bhaak@gmx.net>. spill the tea, she wants to know 🫶

---

👑 AUTHOR 👑

Vilistextum was written by Patric Mueller <bhaak@gmx.net> and may be freely distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License Version 2. There is ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY for this program.

like, ABSOLUTELY no warranty, capital letters and everything. she said what she said 🚨

---

🦋 SEE ALSO 🦋

iconv(3), lynx(1), links(1), w3m(1)

---

and that's the whole page bestie!! 💖✨ this version dropped on 22 OCT 2006 and it's VILISTEXTUM(1) forever — go forth and convert that messy html, you absolute main character 🎀🌈👑