DVI2TTY(1)

🎀 NAME 🎀

okay bestie, meet dvi2tty 💅 (the General Commands Manual's most iconic tool, DVI2TTY(1)) ✨ It previews a TeX DVI file on an ordinary ASCII terminal 🖥️

🌸 SYNOPSIS 🌸

dvi2tty [ options ] dvifile

💖 DESCRIPTION 💖

okay so dvi2tty turns a TeX DVI file into something terminals and line printers can actually handle 🦋 It's meant for preliminary proofreading of your TeX-ed docs, and by default the output goes to your terminal, maybe through a pager (depending on how the program was installed). You can also send it to a file or a pipe 🫶

the output is not perfect, ngl 💀 but it's still super useful when you don't wanna trek over to the laser printer (or whatever) every single time you tweak your document ✨

because dvi2tty is making stuff for terminals and line printers, the representation is pretty primitive, no cap 🙈 font changes get totally ignored in principle, BUT it does recognize a few math and special symbols that an ASCII terminal can show, like the + and - symbols 🧚

if the output text needs more columns than fit on one line (see the -w option), dvi2tty breaks it into several lines 🌈 even though it would print as one line on regular TeX output devices (like laser printers). to show that a broken line is really one logical line, an asterisk (*) in the last position means the logical line keeps going on the next physical line dvi2tty prints. that continuation line starts with a space and an asterisk in the first two columns 💜

fun fact: you can set options in the environment variable DVI2TTY 🎀 but if an option on the command line conflicts with one in the environment, the command line one wins, periodt 👑

🦋 Options 🦋

• -o file — writes the output to a file named file 📝
• -p list — prints the pages picked by list. Numbers refer to TeX page numbers (known as \count0) 📄 An example format for list is 1,3:6,8, which picks pages 1, 3 through 6, and 8. Negative numbers work exactly like they do in TeX, so -1 comes before -4 as in -p-1:-4,17 🔢
• -P list — same vibe as -p, except the page numbers refer to the sequential order of pages in the dvi file. Negative numbers don't make a lot of sense here... 🙃
• -w n — sets your terminal width to n. Valid range is 16–132, and the default is 80 📏 If your terminal can do 132 columns, try -w132 and toggle the terminal into that mode. The output will probably look somewhat better ✨
• -v — specifies the height of lines. Default value is 450000. Lets you adjust the linespacing 🌸
• -q — don't pipe the output through a pager. This might be the default on some systems (it depends on the whims of whoever installed the program) 🙈
• -e n — influences the spacing between words. With a negative value there are fewer spaces between words, with a positive value there are more 🫧 -e-11 seems to have worked well, bestie 💅
• -f — pipes through a pager: $PAGER if it's defined, or whatever the installer compiled in (often more) 📖 This might be the default, but it's still okay to redirect with >. The pager won't get used if the output isn't going to a terminal 🦋
• -F — specifies the pager program to use. This overrides the $PAGER environment variable and the default pager 👑
• -Fprog — uses prog as the program to pipe output into. Great for picking an alternate pager, like -Fless 🧚
• -t — \tt fonts were used (instead of cm) to make the dvi file 🎀
• -a — dvi2tty normally tries to output accented characters. With -a, accented characters come out without the accent sign 💅
• -l — marks page breaks with the two-character sequence ^L. The default is a form-feed character 📄
• -c — doesn't try to translate any characters (like the Scandinavian/latin1 mode) except when running in tt-font 🌈
• -u — toggles processing of certain latin1 characters. Use this if your output device supports latin1 characters 🫶 Note this may interfere with -s
• -s — toggles processing of the special Scandinavian characters that on most (?) terminals in Scandinavia are mapped to {|}[\] 🇸🇪 Note this may interfere with -u

⚠️ bestie, the -u and -s options can clash. Best not to use -u and -s together 💀

• -J — auto detects NTT JTeX, ASCII pTeX, and upTeX dvi format 🔍
• -N — displays NTT JTeX dvi 🇯🇵
• -A — displays ASCII pTeX dvi 🌸
• -U — displays upTeX dvi 💜
• -Eenc — sets the output Japanese encoding. The enc argument can be e, s, j, or u, which mean EUC-JP, Shift_JIS, ISO-2022-JP, and UTF-8 respectively 🎌
• -bdelim — prints the name of a font when switching to it (and when ending it). The delim argument is used to delimit the fontname 🏷️
• -h — shows a help message and exits 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, ngl 😭 This is less likely if you use a wider output than the default 80 📏

only one file may be specified on the command line 💀

---

stay iconic, bestie 💜 this page was last updated 1 May 2022, and it's all DVI2TTY(1) all the way 🎀✨