GNU Dvispell

Tool for converting dvi files.

Eberhard Mattes

Permission is granted to make and distribute verbatim copies of this manual provided the copyright notice and this permission notice are preserved on all copies.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute modified versions of this manual under the conditions for verbatim copying, provided that the entire resulting derived work is distributed under the terms of a permission notice identical to this one.

Permission is granted to copy and distribute translations of this manual into another language, under the above conditions for modified versions, except that this permission notice may be stated in a translation approved by the Foundation.

Introduction

GNU dvispell is a tool for converting DVI files into a readable text files. GNU dvispell pays special attention to converting accented characters. The resulting text file can be used for checking and spelling, but you need another program for doing that, dvispell won't do it.

Running dvispell

        dvispell [option] dvi_file [output_file]

The default extension of dvi_file is .dvi.

If no output file has been specified, output is send to standard output.

GNU dvispell reads parameter from the binary parameter file specified by the -d option. If -d has not been given, the file plain.dsb will be used. If the file name does not contain a directory name, the data subdirectory of the directory specified by the EMTEXDIR environment variable will be searched. If EMTEXDIR is not set, the directory /emtex/data will be searched for the file. If the file name contain a directory name, only that directory will be searched.

Options

Options are started by - or -- or /. The following options are available:

-h
--help: Display help.
-V
--version: Display varsion number.
-c NAME
--converson_table=NAME: Use conversion table <name>. The default is <DEFAULT>
-d FILE
--parameter-file=FILE: Use alternate parameter file. The default extension is .dsb, the default value is plain.dsb.
-l
--letters-only: Output letters only, discard all others characters.
-n
--page-number: Show page number at start of each line.
-o NAME
--output-table=NAME: Use output table <name>. The default is <DEFAULT>.
-q
--quiet: Don't display logo.
-u
--omit-unprintable: Don't display name of unprintable characters.
-v
--verbose: Print progress report (page numbers in brackets) on standard error.
-w FACTOR
--word-space=FACTOR: Multiple word space width defined in TFM files by factor. The default factor is 1.0. If dvispell runs words together, select a factor less than 1.0 (0.9 for instance). If dvispell inserted unwanted spaces into words, select a factor greater than 1.0 (1.1, for instance).
-y FACTOR
--vert-space=FACTOR: Multiply line space defined in TFM files by factor. The default factor is 0.9. If dvispell runs lines together, select a factor less than 0.9. If dvispell inserts unwanted line breaks, select a factor greater then 0.9 (1.0, for instance).

Example

The call

dvispell -c hyphen myfile.dvi myfile.txt

creates the text file myfile.txt from the DVI file myfile.dvi, concatenating hyphaneted words.

Creating a binary parameter file

Use dvisprep to create a binary parameter file (such as plain.dsb) from parameter file in text format (such as plain.dsi). That is, to install dvispell, you have to type:

	dvisprep /emtex/data/plain.dsi

See documentation for dvisprep for details on creating a binary parameter file and on the format on plain.dsi.

Conversion tables

The plain.dsi file that comes with dvispell contains several conversion tables. The following conversion tables can be used with the -c option:

wordlist: One word per line.
hyphen: Concatenate hyphenated words.
hyphen-wordlist: Both wordlist and hyphen.

TFM files

A search path for TFM files can come from many sources. The functions that is responsible for looking tfm files are kpse_set_progname and kpse_find_tfm from kpathsea library. See kpathsea documentation documentation for details of path searching mechanism. In short, kpathsea searches dirextories pointed by:

A user-set environment variable TEXINPUTS_dvispell.
A user-set environment variable TEXINPUTS, TFMFONTS or TEXFONTS.
A line in a Kpathsea configuration file `texmf.cnf'.

Concept Index

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