1DVI2TTY(1)                  General Commands Manual                 DVI2TTY(1)
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NAME

6       dvi2tty - preview a TeX DVI file on an ordinary ASCII terminal
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SYNOPSIS

9       dvi2tty [ options ] dvifile
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DESCRIPTION

12       dvi2tty  converts  a  TeX  DVI file to a format that is appropriate for
13       terminals and line printers. The program is intended  to  be  used  for
14       preliminary proofreading of TeX-ed documents.  By default the output is
15       directed to the terminal, possibly through a pager  (depending  on  how
16       the program was installed), but it can be directed to a file or a pipe.
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18       The  output  leaves much to be desired, but is still useful if you want
19       to avoid walking to the laser printer (or whatever) for each  iteration
20       of your document.
21       Since  dvi2tty produces output for terminals and line printers the rep‐
22       resentation of documents is naturally quite  primitive.   In  principle
23       font  changes  are totally ignored, but dvi2tty recognizes a few mathe‐
24       matical and special symbols that can be displayed on an ordinary  ASCII
25       terminal, such as the '+' and '-' symbol.
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27       If  the width of the output text requires more columns than fits in one
28       line (cf. the -w option) it is broken into several lines by dvi2tty al‐
29       though  they  will be printed as one line on regular TeX output devices
30       (e.g., laser printers). To show that a broken line is really  just  one
31       logical  line  an  asterisk (``*'') in the last position means that the
32       logical line is continued on the next physical line output by  dvi2tty.
33       Such a continuation line is started with a space and an asterisk in the
34       first two columns.
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36       Options may be specified in the environment variable DVI2TTY.  Any  op‐
37       tion on the command line, conflicting with one in the environment, will
38       override the one from the environment.
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40       Options:
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42       -o file
43              Write output to file ``file''.
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45       -p list
46              Print the pages chosen by list.  Numbers refer to TeX page  num‐
47              bers  (known  as  \count0).   An  example  of format for list is
48              ``1,3:6,8'' to choose pages 1, 3 through 6 and 8.  Negative num‐
49              bers  can be used exactly as in TeX, e.g., -1 comes before -4 as
50              in ``-p-1:-4,17''.
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52       -P list
53              Like -p except that page numbers refer to the sequential  order‐
54              ing of the pages in the dvi-file.  Negative numbers don't make a
55              lot of sense here...
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57       -w n   Specify terminal width n.  Valid range 16–132.  Default  is  80.
58              If  your  terminal  has the ability to display in 132 columns it
59              might be a good idea to use -w132 and toggle the  terminal  into
60              this mode as output will probably look somewhat better.
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62       -v     Specify height of lines. Default value 450000. Allows one to ad‐
63              just linespacing.
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65       -q     Don't pipe the output through a pager.  This may be the  default
66              on some systems (depending on the whims of the person installing
67              the program).
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69       -e n   This option can be used to influence the spacing between  words.
70              With a negative value the number of spaces between words becomes
71              less, with a positive value it becomes  more.   -e-11  seems  to
72              worked well.
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74       -f     Pipe  through  a  pager,  $PAGER if defined, or whatever the in‐
75              staller of the program compiled in (often ``more''). This may be
76              the default, but it is still okay to redirect output with ``>'',
77              the pager will not be used if output is not going to a terminal.
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79       -F     Specify the pager program to be used.  This overrides the $PAGER
80              environment variable and the default pager.
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82       -Fprog Use  ``prog''  as  program  to  pipe output into. Can be used to
83              choose an alternate pager (e.g., ``-Fless'').
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85       -t     \tt fonts were used (instead of cm) to produce the dvi file.
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87       -a     Dvi2tty normally tries to output accented characters.  With  the
88              -a  option,  accented  characters  are output without the accent
89              sign.
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91       -l     Mark page breaks with the two-character sequence ``^L''. The de‐
92              fault is to mark them with a form-feed character.
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94       -c     Do  not  attempt to translate any characters (like the Scandina‐
95              vian/latin1 mode) except when running in tt-font.
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97       -u     Toggle option to process certain latin1 characters. Use this  if
98              your  output  devices supports latin1 characters.  Note this may
99              interfere with -s. Best not to use -u and -s together.
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101       -s     Toggle option to process  the  special  Scandinavian  characters
102              that  on  most  (?)   terminals  in  Scandinavia  are  mapped to
103              ``{|}[\]''.  Note this may interfere with -u. Best not to use -u
104              and -s together.
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106       -J     Auto detect NTT JTeX, ASCII pTeX, and upTeX dvi format.
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108       -N     Display NTT JTeX dvi.
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110       -A     Display ASCII pTeX dvi.
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112       -U     Display upTeX dvi.
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114       -Eenc  Set  output  Japanese  encoding. The enc argument 'e', 's', 'j',
115              and 'u' denotes EUC-JP, Shift_JIS, ISO-2022-JP, and  UTF-8,  re‐
116              spectively.
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118       -bdelim
119              Print  the  name  of fonts when switching to it (and ending it).
120              The delim argument is used to delimit the fontname.
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122       -h     Show a help massage and exit successfully.
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FILES

125       /bin/more     probably the default pager.
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ENVIRONMENT

128       PAGER         the pager to use.
129       DVI2TTY       can be set to hold command-line options.
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SEE ALSO

132       TeX, dvi2ps
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AUTHOR

135       Original Pascal version: Svante Lindahl, Royal Institute of Technology,
136       Stockholm
137       Improved C version: Marcel Mol, MESA Consulting
138       Now maintained at https://github.com/t-tk/dvi2tty/releases.
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BUGS

141       Blanks  between words get lost quite easily. This is less likely if you
142       are using a wider output than the default 80.
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144       Only one file may be specified on the command line.
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148                                  1 May 2022                        DVI2TTY(1)
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