Chapter 11. Data conversion

Table of Contents

11.1. Text data conversion tools
11.1.1. Converting a text file with iconv
11.1.2. Checking file to be UTF-8 with iconv
11.1.3. Converting file names with iconv
11.1.4. EOL conversion
11.1.5. TAB conversion
11.1.6. Editors with auto-conversion
11.1.7. Plain text extraction
11.1.8. Highlighting and formatting plain text data
11.2. XML data
11.2.1. Basic hints for XML
11.2.2. XML processing
11.2.3. The XML data extraction
11.3. Printable data
11.3.1. Ghostscript
11.3.2. Merge two PS or PDF files
11.3.3. Printable data utilities
11.3.4. Printing with CUPS
11.4. Type setting
11.4.1. roff typesetting
11.4.2. TeX/LaTeX
11.4.3. Pretty print a manual page
11.4.4. Creating a manual page
11.5. The mail data conversion
11.5.1. Mail data basics
11.6. Graphic data tools
11.7. Miscellaneous data conversion

Tools and tips for converting data formats on the Debian system are described.

Standard based tools are in very good shape but support for proprietary data formats are limited.

11.1. Text data conversion tools

Following packages for the text data conversion caught my eyes.

Table 11.1. List of text data conversion tools

package popcon size keyword description
libc6 http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=libc6 9500 charset text encoding converter between locales by iconv(1) (fundamental)
recode http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=recode 768 charset+eol text encoding converter between locales (versatile, more aliases and features)
konwert http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=konwert 192 charset text encoding converter between locales (fancy)
nkf http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=nkf 205 charset character set translator for Japanese
tcs http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=tcs 544 charset character set translator
unaccent http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=unaccent 76 charset replace accented letters by their unaccented equivalent
tofrodos http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=tofrodos 67 eol text format converter between DOS and Unix: fromdos(1) and todos(1)
macutils http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=macutils 320 eol text format converter between Macintosh and Unix: frommac(1) and tomac(1)

11.1.1. Converting a text file with iconv

[Tip] Tip

iconv(1) is provided as a part of the libc6 package and it is always available on practically all systems to convert the encoding of characters.

You can convert encodings of a text file with iconv(1) by the following.

$ iconv -f encoding1 -t encoding2 input.txt >output.txt

Encoding values are case insensitive and ignore "-" and "_" for matching. Supported encodings can be checked by the "iconv -l" command.

Table 11.2. List of encoding values and their usage

encoding value usage
ASCII. American Standard Code for Information Interchange, 7 bit code w/o accented characters
UTF-8 current multilingual standard for all modern OSs
ISO-8859-1 old standard for western European languages, ASCII + accented characters
ISO-8859-2 old standard for eastern European languages, ASCII + accented characters
ISO-8859-15 old standard for western European languages, ISO-8859-1 with euro sign
CP850 code page 850, Microsoft DOS characters with graphics for western European languages, ISO-8859-1 variant
CP932 code page 932, Microsoft Windows style Shift-JIS variant for Japanese
CP936 code page 936, Microsoft Windows style GB2312, GBK or GB18030 variant for Simplified Chinese
CP949 code page 949, Microsoft Windows style EUC-KR or Unified Hangul Code variant for Korean
CP950 code page 950, Microsoft Windows style Big5 variant for Traditional Chinese
CP1251 code page 1251, Microsoft Windows style encoding for the Cyrillic alphabet
CP1252 code page 1252, Microsoft Windows style ISO-8859-15 variant for western European languages
KOI8-R old Russian UNIX standard for the Cyrillic alphabet
ISO-2022-JP standard encoding for Japanese email which uses only 7 bit codes
eucJP old Japanese UNIX standard 8 bit code and completely different from Shift-JIS
Shift-JIS JIS X 0208 Appendix 1 standard for Japanese (see CP932)

[Note] Note

Some encodings are only supported for the data conversion and are not used as locale values (Section 8.3.1, “Basics of encoding”).

For character sets which fit in single byte such as ASCII and ISO-8859 character sets, the character encoding means almost the same thing as the character set.

For character sets with many characters such as JIS X 0213 for Japanese or Universal Character Set (UCS, Unicode, ISO-10646-1) for practically all languages, there are many encoding schemes to fit them into the sequence of the byte data.

For these, there are clear differentiations between the character set and the character encoding.

The code page is used as the synonym to the character encoding tables for some vendor specific ones.

[Note] Note

Please note most encoding systems share the same code with ASCII for the 7 bit characters. But there are some exceptions. If you are converting old Japanese C programs and URLs data from the casually-called shift-JIS encoding format to UTF-8 format, use "CP932" as the encoding name instead of "shift-JIS" to get the expected results: 0x5C → "\" and 0x7E → "~" . Otherwise, these are converted to wrong characters.

[Tip] Tip

recode(1) may be used too and offers more than the combined functionality of iconv(1), fromdos(1), todos(1), frommac(1), and tomac(1). For more, see "info recode".

11.1.2. Checking file to be UTF-8 with iconv

You can check if a text file is encoded in UTF-8 with iconv(1) by the following.

$ iconv -f utf8 -t utf8 input.txt >/dev/null || echo "non-UTF-8 found"
[Tip] Tip

Use "--verbose" option in the above example to find the first non-UTF-8 character.

11.1.3. Converting file names with iconv

Here is an example script to convert encoding of file names from ones created under older OS to modern UTF-8 ones in a single directory.

#!/bin/sh
ENCDN=iso-8859-1
for x in *;
 do
 mv "$x" "$(echo "$x" | iconv -f $ENCDN -t utf-8)"
done

The "$ENCDN" variable should be set by the encoding value in Table 11.2, “List of encoding values and their usage”.

For more complicated case, please mount a filesystem (e.g. a partition on a disk drive) containing such file names with proper encoding as the mount(8) option (see Section 8.3.6, “Filename encoding”) and copy its entire contents to another filesystem mounted as UTF-8 with "cp -a" command.

11.1.4. EOL conversion

The text file format, specifically the end-of-line (EOL) code, is dependent on the platform.

Table 11.3. List of EOL styles for different platforms

platform EOL code control decimal hexadecimal
Debian (unix) LF ^J 10 0A
MSDOS and Windows CR-LF ^M^J 13 10 0D 0A
Apple's Macintosh CR ^M 13 0D

The EOL format conversion programs, fromdos(1), todos(1), frommac(1), and tomac(1), are quite handy. recode(1) is also useful.

[Note] Note

Some data on the Debian system, such as the wiki page data for the python-moinmoin package, use MSDOS style CR-LF as the EOL code. So the above rule is just a general rule.

[Note] Note

Most editors (eg. vim, emacs, gedit, …) can handle files in MSDOS style EOL transparently.

[Tip] Tip

The use of "sed -e '/\r$/!s/$/\r/'" instead of todos(1) is better when you want to unify the EOL style to the MSDOS style from the mixed MSDOS and Unix style. (e.g., after merging 2 MSDOS style files with diff3(1).) This is because todos adds CR to all lines.

11.1.5. TAB conversion

There are few popular specialized programs to convert the tab codes.

Table 11.4. List of TAB conversion commands from bsdmainutils and coreutils packages

function bsdmainutils coreutils
expand tab to spaces "col -x" expand
unexpand tab from spaces "col -h" unexpand

indent(1) from the indent package completely reformats whitespaces in the C program.

Editor programs such as vim and emacs can be used for TAB conversion, too. For example with vim, you can expand TAB with ":set expandtab" and ":%retab" command sequence. You can revert this with ":set noexpandtab" and ":%retab!" command sequence.

11.1.6. Editors with auto-conversion

Intelligent modern editors such as the vim program are quite smart and copes well with any encoding systems and any file formats. You should use these editors under the UTF-8 locale in the UTF-8 capable console for the best compatibility.

An old western European Unix text file, "u-file.txt", stored in the latin1 (iso-8859-1) encoding can be edited simply with vim by the following.

$ vim u-file.txt

This is possible since the auto detection mechanism of the file encoding in vim assumes the UTF-8 encoding first and, if it fails, assumes it to be latin1.

An old Polish Unix text file, "pu-file.txt", stored in the latin2 (iso-8859-2) encoding can be edited with vim by the following.

$ vim '+e ++enc=latin2 pu-file.txt'

An old Japanese unix text file, "ju-file.txt", stored in the eucJP encoding can be edited with vim by the following.

$ vim '+e ++enc=eucJP ju-file.txt'

An old Japanese MS-Windows text file, "jw-file.txt", stored in the so called shift-JIS encoding (more precisely: CP932) can be edited with vim by the following.

$ vim '+e ++enc=CP932 ++ff=dos jw-file.txt'

When a file is opened with "++enc" and "++ff" options, ":w" in the Vim command line stores it in the original format and overwrite the original file. You can also specify the saving format and the file name in the Vim command line, e.g., ":w ++enc=utf8 new.txt".

Please refer to the mbyte.txt "multi-byte text support" in vim on-line help and Table 11.2, “List of encoding values and their usage” for locale values used with "++enc".

The emacs family of programs can perform the equivalent functions.

11.1.7. Plain text extraction

The following reads a web page into a text file. This is very useful when copying configurations off the Web or applying basic Unix text tools such as grep(1) on the web page.

$ w3m -dump http://www.remote-site.com/help-info.html >textfile

Similarly, you can extract plain text data from other formats using the following.

Table 11.5. List of tools to extract plain text data

package popcon size keyword function
w3m http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=w3m 1825 html→text HTML to text converter with the "w3m -dump" command
html2text http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=html2text 248 html→text advanced HTML to text converter (ISO 8859-1)
lynx http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=lynx 242 html→text HTML to text converter with the "lynx -dump" command
elinks http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=elinks 1364 html→text HTML to text converter with the "elinks -dump" command
links http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=links 1275 html→text HTML to text converter with the "links -dump" command
links2 http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=links2 3092 html→text HTML to text converter with the "links2 -dump" command
antiword http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=antiword 560 MSWord→text,ps convert MSWord files to plain text or ps
catdoc http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=catdoc 2668 MSWord→text,TeX convert MSWord files to plain text or TeX
pstotext http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=pstotext 123 ps/pdf→text extract text from PostScript and PDF files
unhtml http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=unhtml 76 html→text remove the markup tags from an HTML file
odt2txt http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=odt2txt 73 odt→text converter from OpenDocument Text to text

11.1.8. Highlighting and formatting plain text data

You can highlight and format plain text data by the following.

Table 11.6. List of tools to highlight plain text data

package popcon size keyword description
vim-runtime http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=vim-runtime 22298 highlight Vim MACRO to convert source code to HTML with ":source $VIMRUNTIME/syntax/html.vim"
cxref http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=cxref 1115 c→html converter for the C program to latex and HTML (C language)
src2tex http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=src2tex 1968 highlight convert many source codes to TeX (C language)
source-highlight http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=source-highlight 1939 highlight convert many source codes to HTML, XHTML, LaTeX, Texinfo, ANSI color escape sequences and DocBook files with highlight (C++)
highlight http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=highlight 726 highlight convert many source codes to HTML, XHTML, RTF, LaTeX, TeX or XSL-FO files with highlight (C++)
grc http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=grc 232 text→color generic colouriser for everything (Python)
txt2html http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=txt2html 296 text→html text to HTML converter (Perl)
markdown http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=markdown 96 text→html markdown text document formatter to (X)HTML (Perl)
asciidoc http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=asciidoc 3165 text→any AsciiDoc text document formatter to XML/HTML (Python)
python-docutils http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=python-docutils 1548 text→any ReStructured Text document formatter to XML (Python)
txt2tags http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=txt2tags 1152 text→any document conversion from text to HTML, SGML, LaTeX, man page, MoinMoin, Magic Point and PageMaker (Python)
udo http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=udo 556 text→any universal document - text processing utility (C language)
stx2any http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=stx2any 484 text→any document converter from structured plain text to other formats (m4)
rest2web http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=rest2web 576 text→html document converter from ReStructured Text to html (Python)
aft http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=aft 259 text→any "free form" document preparation system (Perl)
yodl http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=yodl 409 text→any pre-document language and tools to process it (C language)
sdf http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=sdf 1414 text→any simple document parser (Perl)
sisu http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=sisu 9149 text→any document structuring, publishing and search framework (Ruby)

11.2. XML data

The Extensible Markup Language (XML) is a markup language for documents containing structured information.

See introductory information at XML.COM.

11.2.1. Basic hints for XML

XML text looks somewhat like HTML. It enables us to manage multiple formats of output for a document. One easy XML system is the docbook-xsl package, which is used here.

Each XML file starts with standard XML declaration as the following.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?>

The basic syntax for one XML element is marked up as the following.

<name attribute="value">content</name>

XML element with empty content is marked up in the following short form.

<name attribute="value"/>

The "attribute="value"" in the above examples are optional.

The comment section in XML is marked up as the following.

<!-- comment -->

Other than adding markups, XML requires minor conversion to the content using predefined entities for following characters.

Table 11.7. List of predefined entities for XML

predefined entity character to be converted from
&quot; " : quote
&apos; ' : apostrophe
&lt; < : less-than
&gt; > : greater-than
&amp; & : ampersand

[Caution] Caution

"<" or "&" can not be used in attributes or elements.

[Note] Note

When SGML style user defined entities, e.g. "&some-tag:", are used, the first definition wins over others. The entity definition is expressed in "<!ENTITY some-tag "entity value">".

[Note] Note

As long as the XML markup are done consistently with certain set of the tag name (either some data as content or attribute value), conversion to another XML is trivial task using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT).

11.2.2. XML processing

There are many tools available to process XML files such as the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL).

Basically, once you create well formed XML file, you can convert it to any format using Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT).

The Extensible Stylesheet Language for Formatting Object (XSL-FO) is supposed to be solution for formatting. The fop package is in the Debian contrib (not main) archive still. So the LaTeX code is usually generated from XML using XSLT and the LaTeX system is used to create printable file such as DVI, PostScript, and PDF.

Table 11.8. List of XML tools

package popcon size keyword description
docbook-xml http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=docbook-xml 2488 xml XML document type definition (DTD) for DocBook
xsltproc http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=xsltproc 165 xslt XSLT command line processor (XML→ XML, HTML, plain text, etc.)
docbook-xsl http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=docbook-xsl 11589 xml/xslt XSL stylesheets for processing DocBook XML to various output formats with XSLT
xmlto http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=xmlto 134 xml/xslt XML-to-any converter with XSLT
dblatex http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=dblatex 6799 xml/xslt convert Docbook files to DVI, PostScript, PDF documents with XSLT
fop http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=fop 90 xml/xsl-fo convert Docbook XML files to PDF

Since XML is subset of Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML), it can be processed by the extensive tools available for SGML, such as Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL).

Table 11.9. List of DSSL tools

package popcon size keyword description
openjade http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=openjade 1063 dsssl ISO/IEC 10179:1996 standard DSSSL processor (latest)
openjade1.3 http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=openjade1.3 2226 dsssl ISO/IEC 10179:1996 standard DSSSL processor (1.3.x series)
jade http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=jade 872 dsssl James Clark's original DSSSL processor (1.2.x series)
docbook-dsssl http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=docbook-dsssl 3100 xml/dsssl DSSSL stylesheets for processing DocBook XML to various output formats with DSSSL
docbook-utils http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=docbook-utils 220 xml/dsssl utilities for DocBook files including conversion to other formats (HTML, RTF, PS, man, PDF) with docbook2* commands with DSSSL
sgml2x http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=sgml2x 216 SGML/dsssl converter from SGML and XML using DSSSL stylesheets

[Tip] Tip

GNOME's yelp is sometimes handy to read DocBook XML files directly since it renders decently on X.

11.2.3. The XML data extraction

You can extract HTML or XML data from other formats using followings.

Table 11.10. List of XML data extraction tools

package popcon size keyword description
wv http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=wv 351 MSWord→any document converter from Microsoft Word to HTML, LaTeX, etc.
texi2html http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=texi2html 2076 texi→html converter from Texinfo to HTML
man2html http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=man2html 180 manpage→html converter from manpage to HTML (CGI support)
tex4ht http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=tex4ht 515 tex↔html converter between (La)TeX and HTML
xlhtml http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=xlhtml 184 MSExcel→html converter from MSExcel .xls to HTML
ppthtml http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=ppthtml 120 MSPowerPoint→html converter from MSPowerPoint to HTML
unrtf http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=unrtf 224 rtf→html document converter from RTF to HTML, etc
info2www http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=info2www 156 info→html converter from GNU info to HTML (CGI support)
ooo2dbk http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=ooo2dbk 941 sxw→xml converter from OpenOffice.org SXW documents to DocBook XML
wp2x http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=wp2x 156 WordPerfect→any WordPerfect 5.0 and 5.1 files to TeX, LaTeX, troff, GML and HTML
doclifter http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=doclifter 460 troff→xml converter from troff to DocBook XML

For non-XML HTML files, you can convert them to XHTML which is an instance of well formed XML. XHTML can be processed by XML tools.

Table 11.11. List of XML pretty print tools

package popcon size keyword description
libxml2-utils http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=libxml2-utils 139 xml↔html↔xhtml command line XML tool with xmllint(1) (syntax check, reformat, lint, …)
tidy http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=tidy 82 xml↔html↔xhtml HTML syntax checker and reformatter

Once proper XML is generated, you can use XSLT technology to extract data based on the mark-up context etc.

11.3. Printable data

Printable data is expressed in the PostScript format on the Debian system. Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) uses Ghostscript as its rasterizer backend program for non-PostScript printers.

11.3.1. Ghostscript

The core of printable data manipulation is the Ghostscript PostScript (PS) interpreter which generates raster image.

The latest upstream Ghostscript from Artifex was re-licensed from AFPL to GPL and merged all the latest ESP version changes such as CUPS related ones at 8.60 release as unified release.

Table 11.12. List of Ghostscript PostScript interpreters


[Tip] Tip

"gs -h" can display the configuration of Ghostscript.

11.3.2. Merge two PS or PDF files

You can merge two PostScript (PS) or Portable Document Format (PDF) files using gs(1) of Ghostscript.

$ gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pswrite -sOutputFile=bla.ps -f foo1.ps foo2.ps
$ gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=bla.pdf -f foo1.pdf foo2.pdf
[Note] Note

The PDF, which is widely used cross-platform printable data format, is essentially the compressed PS format with few additional features and extensions.

[Tip] Tip

For command line, psmerge(1) and other commands from the psutils package are useful for manipulating PostScript documents. Commands in the pdfjam package work similarly for manipulating PDF documents. pdftk(1) from the pdftk package is useful for manipulating PDF documents, too.

11.3.3. Printable data utilities

The following packages for the printable data utilities caught my eyes.

Table 11.13. List of printable data utilities

package popcon size keyword description
poppler-utils http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=poppler-utils 542 pdf→ps,text,… PDF utilities: pdftops, pdfinfo, pdfimages, pdftotext, pdffonts
psutils http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=psutils 243 ps→ps PostScript document conversion tools
poster http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=poster 80 ps→ps create large posters out of PostScript pages
enscript http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=enscript 2147 text→ps, html, rtf convert ASCII text to PostScript, HTML, RTF or Pretty-Print
a2ps http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=a2ps 4292 text→ps 'Anything to PostScript' converter and pretty-printer
pdftk http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=pdftk 3039 pdf→pdf PDF document conversion tool: pdftk
mpage http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=mpage 224 text,ps→ps print multiple pages per sheet
html2ps http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=html2ps 320 html→ps converter from HTML to PostScript
pdfjam http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=pdfjam 122 pdf→pdf PDF document conversion tools: pdf90, pdfjoin, and pdfnup
gnuhtml2latex http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=gnuhtml2latex 53 html→latex converter from html to latex
latex2rtf http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=latex2rtf 508 latex→rtf convert documents from LaTeX to RTF which can be read by MS Word
ps2eps http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=ps2eps 136 ps→eps converter from PostScript to EPS (Encapsulated PostScript)
e2ps http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=e2ps 188 text→ps Text to PostScript converter with Japanese encoding support
impose+ http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=impose+ 180 ps→ps PostScript utilities
trueprint http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=trueprint 188 text→ps pretty print many source codes (C, C++, Java, Pascal, Perl, Pike, Sh, and Verilog) to PostScript. (C language)
pdf2svg http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=pdf2svg 60 ps→svg converter from PDF to Scalable vector graphics format
pdftoipe http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=pdftoipe 91 ps→ipe converter from PDF to IPE's XML format

11.3.4. Printing with CUPS

Both lp(1) and lpr(1) commands offered by Common Unix Printing System (CUPS) provides options for customized printing the printable data.

You can print 3 copies of a file collated using one of the following commands.

$ lp -n 3 -o Collate=True filename
$ lpr -#3 -o Collate=True filename

You can further customize printer operation by using printer option such as "-o number-up=2", "-o page-set=even", "-o page-set=odd", "-o scaling=200", "-o natural-scaling=200", etc., documented at Command-Line Printing and Options.

11.4. Type setting

The Unix troff program originally developed by AT&T can be used for simple typesetting. It is usually used to create manpages.

TeX created by Donald Knuth is very powerful type setting tool and is the de facto standard. LaTeX originally written by Leslie Lamport enables a high-level access to the power of TeX.

Table 11.14. List of type setting tools

package popcon size keyword description
texlive http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=texlive 103 (La)TeX TeX system for typesetting, previewing and printing
groff http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=groff 8095 troff GNU troff text-formatting system

11.4.1. roff typesetting

Traditionally, roff is the main Unix text processing system. See roff(7), groff(7), groff(1), grotty(1), troff(1), groff_mdoc(7), groff_man(7), groff_ms(7), groff_me(7), groff_mm(7), and "info groff".

You can read or print a good tutorial and reference on "-me" macro in "/usr/share/doc/groff/" by installing the groff package.

[Tip] Tip

"groff -Tascii -me -" produces plain text output with ANSI escape code. If you wish to get manpage like output with many "^H" and "_", use "GROFF_NO_SGR=1 groff -Tascii -me -" instead.

[Tip] Tip

To remove "^H" and "_" from a text file generated by groff, filter it by "col -b -x".

11.4.2. TeX/LaTeX

The TeX Live software distribution offers a complete TeX system. The texlive metapackage provides a decent selection of the TeX Live packages which should suffice for the most common tasks.

There are many references available for TeX and LaTeX.

  • The teTeX HOWTO: The Linux-teTeX Local Guide

  • tex(1)

  • latex(1)

  • "The TeXbook", by Donald E. Knuth, (Addison-Wesley)

  • "LaTeX - A Document Preparation System", by Leslie Lamport, (Addison-Wesley)

  • "The LaTeX Companion", by Goossens, Mittelbach, Samarin, (Addison-Wesley)

This is the most powerful typesetting environment. Many SGML processors use this as their back end text processor. Lyx provided by the lyx package and GNU TeXmacs provided by the texmacs package offer nice WYSIWYG editing environment for LaTeX while many use Emacs and Vim as the choice for the source editor.

There are many online resources available.

When documents become bigger, sometimes TeX may cause errors. You must increase pool size in "/etc/texmf/texmf.cnf" (or more appropriately edit "/etc/texmf/texmf.d/95NonPath" and run update-texmf(8)) to fix this.

[Note] Note

The TeX source of "The TeXbook" is available at http://tug.ctan.org/tex-archive/systems/knuth/dist/tex/texbook.tex.

This file contains most of the required macros. I heard that you can process this document with tex(1) after commenting lines 7 to 10 and adding "\input manmac \proofmodefalse". It's strongly recommended to buy this book (and all other books from Donald E. Knuth) instead of using the online version but the source is a great example of TeX input!

11.4.3. Pretty print a manual page

You can print a manual page in PostScript nicely by one of the following commands.

$ man -Tps some_manpage | lpr
$ man -Tps some_manpage | mpage -2 | lpr

The second example prints 2 pages on one sheet.

11.4.4. Creating a manual page

Although writing a manual page (manpage) in the plain troff format is possible, there are few helper packages to create it.

Table 11.15. List of packages to help creating the manpage

package popcon size keyword description
docbook-to-man http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=docbook-to-man 213 SGML→manpage converter from DocBook SGML into roff man macros
help2man http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=help2man 485 text→manpage automatic manpage generator from --help
info2man http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=info2man 161 info→manpage converter from GNU info to POD or man pages
txt2man http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=txt2man 88 text→manpage convert flat ASCII text to man page format

11.5. The mail data conversion

The following packages for the mail data conversion caught my eyes.

Table 11.16. List of packages to help mail data conversion

package popcon size keyword description
sharutils http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=sharutils 1408 mail shar(1), unshar(1), uuencode(1), uudecode(1)
mpack http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=mpack 109 MIME encoder and decoder MIME messages: mpack(1) and munpack(1)
tnef http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=tnef 132 ms-tnef unpacking MIME attachments of type "application/ms-tnef" which is a Microsoft only format
uudeview http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=uudeview 117 mail encoder and decoder for the following formats: uuencode, xxencode, BASE64, quoted printable, and BinHex
readpst http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=readpst 228 PST convert Microsoft Outlook PST files to mbox format

[Tip] Tip

The Internet Message Access Protocol version 4 (IMAP4) server (see Section 6.7, “POP3/IMAP4 server”) may be used to move mails out from proprietary mail systems if the mail client software can be configured to use IMAP4 server too.

11.5.1. Mail data basics

Mail (SMTP) data should be limited to 7 bit. So binary data and 8 bit text data are encoded into 7 bit format with the Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME) and the selection of the charset (see Section 8.3.1, “Basics of encoding”).

The standard mail storage format is mbox formatted according to RFC2822 (updated RFC822). See mbox(5) (provided by the mutt package).

For European languages, "Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable" with the ISO-8859-1 charset is usually used for mail since there are not much 8 bit characters. If European text is encoded in UTF-8, "Content-Transfer-Encoding: quoted-printable" is likely to be used since it is mostly 7 bit data.

For Japanese, traditionally "Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-2022-JP" is usually used for mail to keep text in 7 bits. But older Microsoft systems may send mail data in Shift-JIS without proper declaration. If Japanese text is encoded in UTF-8, Base64 is likely to be used since it contains many 8 bit data. The situation of other Asian languages is similar.

[Note] Note

If your non-Unix mail data is accessible by a non-Debian client software which can talk to the IMAP4 server, you may be able to move them out by running your own IMAP4 server (see Section 6.7, “POP3/IMAP4 server”).

[Note] Note

If you use other mail storage formats, moving them to mbox format is the good first step. The versatile client program such as mutt(1) may be handy for this.

You can split mailbox contents to each message using procmail(1) and formail(1).

Each mail message can be unpacked using munpack(1) from the mpack package (or other specialized tools) to obtain the MIME encoded contents.

11.6. Graphic data tools

The following packages for the graphic data conversion, editing, and organization tools caught my eyes.

Table 11.17. List of graphic data tools

package popcon size keyword description
gimp http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=gimp 15168 image(bitmap) GNU Image Manipulation Program
imagemagick http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=imagemagick 207 image(bitmap) image manipulation programs
graphicsmagick http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=graphicsmagick 4335 image(bitmap) image manipulation programs (folk of imagemagick)
xsane http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=xsane 702 image(bitmap) GTK+-based X11 frontend for SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy)
netpbm http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=netpbm 3464 image(bitmap) graphics conversion tools
icoutils http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=icoutils 160 png↔ico(bitmap) convert MS Windows icons and cursors to and from PNG formats (favicon.ico)
scribus http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=scribus 54492 ps/pdf/SVG/… Scribus DTP editor
openoffice.org-draw http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=openoffice.org-draw 164 image(vector) OpenOffice.org office suite - drawing
inkscape http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=inkscape 80425 image(vector) SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) editor
dia-gnome http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=dia-gnome 617 image(vector) diagram editor (GNOME)
dia http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=dia 617 image(vector) diagram editor (Gtk)
xfig http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=xfig 1597 image(vector) facility for Interactive Generation of figures under X11
pstoedit http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=pstoedit 683 ps/pdf→image(vector) PostScript and PDF files to editable vector graphics converter (SVG)
libwmf-bin http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=libwmf-bin 118 Windows/image(vector) Windows metafile (vector graphic data) conversion tools
fig2sxd http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=fig2sxd 200 fig→sxd(vector) convert XFig files to OpenOffice.org Draw format
unpaper http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=unpaper 736 image→image post-processing tool for scanned pages for OCR
tesseract-ocr http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=tesseract-ocr 435 image→text free OCR software based on the HP's commercial OCR engine
tesseract-ocr-eng http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=tesseract-ocr-eng 58870 image→text OCR engine data: tesseract-ocr language files for English text
gocr http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=gocr 473 image→text free OCR software
ocrad http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=ocrad 255 image→text free OCR software
gtkam http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=gtkam 1255 image(Exif) manipulate digital camera photo files (GNOME) - GUI
gphoto2 http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=gphoto2 1036 image(Exif) manipulate digital camera photo files (GNOME) - command line
kamera http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=kamera 245 image(Exif) manipulate digital camera photo files (KDE)
jhead http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=jhead 126 image(Exif) manipulate the non-image part of Exif compliant JPEG (digital camera photo) files
exif http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=exif 212 image(Exif) command-line utility to show EXIF information in JPEG files
exiftags http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=exiftags 198 image(Exif) utility to read Exif tags from a digital camera JPEG file
exiftran http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=exiftran 91 image(Exif) transform digital camera jpeg images
exifprobe http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=exifprobe 484 image(Exif) read metadata from digital pictures
dcraw http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=dcraw 424 image(Raw)→ppm decode raw digital camera images
findimagedupes http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=findimagedupes 123 image→fingerprint find visually similar or duplicate images
ale http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=ale 757 image→image merge images to increase fidelity or create mosaics
imageindex http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=imageindex 171 image(Exif)→html generate static HTML galleries from images
f-spot http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=f-spot 8219 image(Exif) personal photo management application (GNOME)
bins http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=bins 2008 image(Exif)→html generate static HTML photo albums using XML and EXIF tags
gallery2 http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=gallery2 46635 image(Exif)→html generate browsable HTML photo albums with thumbnails
outguess http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=outguess 252 jpeg,png universal Steganographic tool
qcad http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=qcad 31 DXF CAD data editor (KDE)
blender http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=blender 57306 blend, TIFF, VRML, … 3D content editor for animation etc
mm3d http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=mm3d 5171 ms3d, obj, dxf, … OpenGL based 3D model editor
open-font-design-toolkit http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=open-font-design-toolkit 27 ttf, ps, … metapackage for open font design
fontforge http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=fontforge 6696 ttf, ps, … font editor for PS, TrueType and OpenType fonts
xgridfit http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=xgridfit 1060 ttf program for gridfitting and hinting TrueType fonts

[Tip] Tip

Search more image tools using regex "~Gworks-with::image" in aptitude(8) (see Section 2.2.6, “Search method options with aptitude”).

Although GUI programs such as gimp(1) are very powerful, command line tools such as imagemagick(1) are quite useful for automating image manipulation with the script.

The de facto image file format of the digital camera is the Exchangeable Image File Format (EXIF) which is the JPEG image file format with additional metadata tags. It can hold information such as date, time, and camera settings.

The Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) lossless data compression patent has been expired. Graphics Interchange Format (GIF) utilities which use the LZW compression method are now freely available on the Debian system.

[Tip] Tip

Any digital camera or scanner with removable recording media works with Linux through USB storage readers since it follows the Design rule for Camera Filesystem and uses FAT filesystem. See Section 10.1.10, “Removable storage device”.

11.7. Miscellaneous data conversion

There are many other programs for converting data. Following packages caught my eyes using regex "~Guse::converting" in aptitude(8) (see Section 2.2.6, “Search method options with aptitude”).

Table 11.18. List of miscellaneous data conversion tools

package popcon size keyword description
alien http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=alien 209 rpm/tgz→deb converter for the foreign package into the Debian package
freepwing http://qa.debian.org/popcon.php?package=freepwing 568 EB→EPWING converter from "Electric Book" (popular in Japan) to a single JIS X 4081 format (a subset of the EPWING V1)

You can also extract data from RPM format with the following.

$ rpm2cpio file.src.rpm | cpio --extract