The Yodl package is distributed with scripts yodl2tex, yodl2html and other yodl2... drivers. Basically, an invocation like
yodl2tex file

starts the yodl program to process file.yo and to write output to file.tex. The extension of the input file, .yo, is the default Yodl extension; the extension of the output file, .tex, is given by the name of the shell script. The script yodl2html hence writes to a file with the extension .html.

Furthermore, the conversion scripts auto-load the right macro file: tex.yo for LaTeX conversions, html.yo for HTML conversions, etc.. The macro files are of course found in the system-wide include directory.

When the conversion scripts are started without arguments, usage information is shown.

The output files are, depending on the conversion:

  • For LaTeX conversions, one output file with the extension .tex is written.

  • For HTML conversions, several files may be written holding the separate chapters of the original document. When the document is not sectioned by chapters, only one output file is created.

    The `main' output file always has the name of the input file but with extension .html. This file holds the document title and the table of contents. When more than one output files are created, then they are named name01.html, name02.html etc., where name is the original name of the input file. E.g., a document prog.yo might lead to prog.html, prog01.html etc..

  • For groff conversions two output formats are supported: the man format (invoked by yodl2man and resulting in a file .man), and the ms format (invoked by yodl2ms and resulting in a file .ms). The differences between the man and ms macro sets of groff make different converters and output files necessary.

  • For SGML conversions, one output file with the extension .sgml is written.

  • For ASCII conversions, the converter is named yodl2txt and one output file with the extension .txt is created.

  • The Yodl package furthermore holds `second-step' scripts, which are:

  • The conversion script yodl2dvi is one more step on top of yodl2tex: it also runs LaTeX on the resulting .tex file. This script tries to be smart about it; when LaTeX' logfile indicates warnings about unresolved labels, the LaTeX process is started once again. This process is repeated up to three times.

  • The script yodl2manless is an extra step to yodl2man: it converts a .yo file to .man format, and runs groff on it, piping the output to a less-like pager for viewing.

  • Similar to yodl2manless, the script yodl2msless starts the ms converter and pipes the groff output through a pager.

  • The script yodl2msps is an extra step on top of the ms converter; it converts the ms output file into PostScript format.

  • The scripts yodl2manless and yodl2msless start groff with the instruction to produce plain ASCII text. The groff program then (usually) outputs boldface as overstrike, and italics as underlined. This convention is most often used, and is meant to provide some degree of font alternation for printed ASCII documents. If you want to convert a Yodl document to true ASCII, without overstrikes or underlines, take a look at the C program striproff which is included in the Yodl distribution as misc/striproff.c. This program is not compiled and installed by the default Yodl installation process, but is only distributed as an example. If you choose to compile and install it, you can use it as follows, assuming that you have a manpage document mymanpage.yo and an article myarticle.yo:

    % yodl2manless mymanpage | striproff > mymanpage.txt
    % yodl2msless myarticle  | striproff > myarticle.txt
    

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    Copyright (c) 1997, 1998, 1999 Karel Kubat and Jan Nieuwenhuizen.

    Verbatim copying and distribution of this entire article is permitted in any medium, provided this notice is preserved.


    This page was built from Yodl-1.31.18 by

    <(address unknown)>, Wed Jan 26 19:23:49 2005 EST.