DVI2TTY(1) General Commands Manual DVI2TTY(1)
NAME
dvi2tty - preview a TeX DVI file on an ordinary ASCII terminal
SYNOPSIS
dvi2tty [ options ] dvifile
DESCRIPTION
dvi2tty converts a TeX DVI file to a format that is appropriate for ter-
minals and line printers. The program is intended to be used for prelim-
inary proofreading of TeX-ed documents. By default the output is di-
rected to the terminal, possibly through a pager (depending on how the
program was installed), but it can be directed to a file or a pipe.
The output leaves much to be desired, but is still useful if you want to
avoid walking to the laser printer (or whatever) for each iteration of
your document.
Since dvi2tty produces output for terminals and line printers the repre-
sentation of documents is naturally quite primitive. In principle font
changes are totally ignored, but dvi2tty recognizes a few mathematical
and special symbols that can be displayed on an ordinary ASCII terminal,
such as the '+' and '-' symbol.
If the width of the output text requires more columns than fits in one
line (cf. the -w option) it is broken into several lines by dvi2tty al-
though they will be printed as one line on regular TeX output devices
(e.g., laser printers). To show that a broken line is really just one
logical line an asterisk (``*'') in the last position means that the
logical line is continued on the next physical line output by dvi2tty.
Such a continuation line is started with a space and an asterisk in the
first two columns.
Options may be specified in the environment variable DVI2TTY. Any op-
tion on the command line, conflicting with one in the environment, will
override the one from the environment.
Options:
-o file
Write output to file ``file''.
-p list
Print the pages chosen by list. Numbers refer to TeX page num-
bers (known as \count0). An example of format for list is
``1,3:6,8'' to choose pages 1, 3 through 6 and 8. Negative num-
bers can be used exactly as in TeX, e.g., -1 comes before -4 as
in ``-p-1:-4,17''.
-P list
Like -p except that page numbers refer to the sequential ordering
of the pages in the dvi-file. Negative numbers don't make a lot
of sense here...
-w n Specify terminal width n. Valid range 16–132. Default is 80. If
your terminal has the ability to display in 132 columns it might
be a good idea to use -w132 and toggle the terminal into this
mode as output will probably look somewhat better.
-v Specify height of lines. Default value 450000. Allows one to ad-
just linespacing.
-q Don't pipe the output through a pager. This may be the default
on some systems (depending on the whims of the person installing
the program).
-e n This option can be used to influence the spacing between words.
With a negative value the number of spaces between words becomes
less, with a positive value it becomes more. -e-11 seems to
worked well.
-f Pipe through a pager, $PAGER if defined, or whatever the in-
staller of the program compiled in (often ``more''). This may be
the default, but it is still okay to redirect output with ``>'',
the pager will not be used if output is not going to a terminal.
-F Specify the pager program to be used. This overrides the $PAGER
environment variable and the default pager.
-Fprog Use ``prog'' as program to pipe output into. Can be used to
choose an alternate pager (e.g., ``-Fless'').
-t \tt fonts were used (instead of cm) to produce the dvi file.
-a Dvi2tty normally tries to output accented characters. With the -a
option, accented characters are output without the accent sign.
-l Mark page breaks with the two-character sequence ``^L''. The de-
fault is to mark them with a form-feed character.
-c Do not attempt to translate any characters (like the Scandina-
vian/latin1 mode) except when running in tt-font.
-u Toggle option to process certain latin1 characters. Use this if
your output devices supports latin1 characters. Note this may
interfere with -s. Best not to use -u and -s together.
-s Toggle option to process the special Scandinavian characters that
on most (?) terminals in Scandinavia are mapped to ``{|}[\]''.
Note this may interfere with -u. Best not to use -u and -s to-
gether.
-J Auto detect NTT JTeX, ASCII pTeX, and upTeX dvi format.
-N Display NTT JTeX dvi.
-A Display ASCII pTeX dvi.
-U Display upTeX dvi.
-Eenc Set output Japanese encoding. The enc argument 'e', 's', 'j', and
'u' denotes EUC-JP, Shift_JIS, ISO-2022-JP, and UTF-8, respec-
tively.
-bdelim
Print the name of fonts when switching to it (and ending it). The
delim argument is used to delimit the fontname.
-h Show a help massage and exit 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. This is less likely if you
are using a wider output than the default 80.
Only one file may be specified on the command line.
1 May 2022 DVI2TTY(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 05:57:51 CET 2025.