Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!psuvax1!hydra!droms
From: droms@regulus (Ralph E. Droms)
Newsgroups: comp.text.tex
Subject: Re: ASCII output from LaTeX
Message-ID: <569@hydra.bucknell.edu>
Date: 13 Jan 91 04:07:00 GMT
References: <567@hydra.bucknell.edu> <1991Jan12.225355.28342@NCoast.ORG>
Sender: news@hydra.bucknell.edu
Reply-To: droms@regulus (Ralph E. Droms)
Organization: Bucknell University, Lewisburg, PA
Lines: 27
In-reply-to: allbery@NCoast.ORG (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR)

In article <1991Jan12.225355.28342@NCoast.ORG>, allbery@NCoast (Brandon S. Allbery KB8JRR) writes:
>As quoted from <567@hydra.bucknell.edu> by droms@hydra.bucknell.edu (Ralph E. Droms):
>+---------------
[...]
>| also made a few modifications to dvi2ps to generate better ASCII
I misspoke myself here ... I made modifications to *dvi2tty*, not dvips.
[...]
>
>You might look at dvi2tty and/or dvi2vdu, which convert dvi files to ASCII
>representations.  With fixed-width fonts, it should be possible to coerce TeX
>and LaTeX into producing output that will display with the proper spacing
>using these programs, and dvi2tty at least can be run on a stream to generate
>ASCII on the fly from a .dvi file, while allowing dvi?ps to be run on it to

Having pointed out my earlier typo, I'll explain that I am using
dvi2tty, and I had to make some minor changes to dvi2tty's conversion
model to generate better ASCII output for my particular application.
For example, I use a fixed character width, don't fold lines, and
eliminate some accumulated vertical spacing errors in the ASCII
output.  None of the changes to dvi2tty are very significant, but they
make a tremendous difference in the quality of the output.

--
- Ralph Droms                 Computer Science Department
  droms@bucknell.edu          323 Dana Engineering
                              Bucknell University
  (717) 524-1145              Lewisburg, PA 17837