== Data conversion

// vim: set sts=2 expandtab:
// Use ":set nowrap" to edit table

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.

=== Text data conversion tools

Following packages for the text data conversion caught my eyes.

.List of text data conversion tools
[grid="all"]
`----------`-------------`------------`-----------`-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
package    popcon        size         keyword     description
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`libc6`    @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ charset     text encoding converter between locales by `iconv`(1) (fundamental)
`recode`   @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ charset+eol text encoding converter between locales (versatile, more aliases and features)
`konwert`  @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ charset     text encoding converter between locales (fancy)
`nkf`      @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ charset     character set translator for Japanese
`tcs`      @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ charset     character set translator
`unaccent` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ charset     replace accented letters by their unaccented equivalent
`tofrodos` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ eol         text format converter between DOS and Unix: `fromdos`(1) and `todos`(1)
`macutils` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ eol         text format converter between Macintosh and Unix: `frommac`(1) and `tomac`(1)
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

==== Converting a text file with iconv

TIP: `iconv`(1) is provided as a part of the `libc6` package and it is always available on practically all Unix-like 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.

[[list-of-encoding-values]]
.List of encoding values and their usage
[grid="all"]
`---------------------------------------------------------`------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
encoding value                                            usage
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII[ASCII]                 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII[American Standard Code for Information Interchange], 7 bit code w/o accented characters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8[UTF-8]                 current multilingual standard for all modern OSs
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1[ISO-8859-1]   old standard for western European languages, ASCII + accented characters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-2[ISO-8859-2]   old standard for eastern European languages, ASCII + accented characters
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-15[ISO-8859-15] old standard for western European languages, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1[ISO-8859-1] with euro sign
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_850[CP850]         code page 850, Microsoft DOS characters with graphics for western European languages, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-1[ISO-8859-1] variant
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_932[CP932]         code page 932, Microsoft Windows style http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_JIS[Shift-JIS] variant for Japanese
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_936[CP936]         code page 936, Microsoft Windows style http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB2312[GB2312], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GBK[GBK] or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GB18030[GB18030] variant for Simplified Chinese
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_949[CP949]         code page 949, Microsoft Windows style http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Unix_Code#EUC-KR[EUC-KR] or Unified Hangul Code variant for Korean
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_950[CP950]         code page 950, Microsoft Windows style http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Big5[Big5] variant for Traditional Chinese
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1251[CP1251]         code page 1251, Microsoft Windows style encoding for the Cyrillic alphabet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows-1252[CP1252]         code page 1252, Microsoft Windows style http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859-15[ISO-8859-15] variant for western European languages
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/KOI8-R[KOI8-R]               old Russian UNIX standard for the Cyrillic alphabet
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_2022[ISO-2022-JP]    standard encoding for Japanese email which uses only 7 bit codes
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Unix_Code[eucJP]    old Japanese UNIX standard 8 bit code and completely different from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_JIS[Shift-JIS]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shift_JIS[Shift-JIS]         JIS X 0208 Appendix 1 standard for Japanese (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page_932[CP932])
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

NOTE: Some encodings are only supported for the data conversion and are not used as locale values (<<_basics_of_encoding>>).

For character sets which fit in single byte such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ASCII[ASCII] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_8859[ISO-8859] character sets, the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Character_encoding[character encoding] means almost the same thing as the character set.

For character sets with many characters such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_0213[JIS X 0213] for Japanese or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Universal_Character_Set[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.

- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_Unix_Code[EUC] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISO/IEC_2022[ISO/IEC 2022 (also known as JIS X 0202)] for Japanese
- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-8[UTF-8], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-16/UCS-2[UTF-16/UCS-2] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UTF-32/UCS-4[UTF-32/UCS-4] for Unicode

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

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_page[code page] is used as the synonym to the character encoding tables for some vendor specific ones.

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: `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`".


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

==== 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 specifies the original encoding used for file names under older OS as in <<list-of-encoding-values>>.

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 <<_filename_encoding>>) and copy its entire contents to another filesystem mounted as UTF-8 with "`cp -a`" command.

==== EOL conversion

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

.List of EOL styles for different platforms
[grid="all"]
`------------------------`---------`--------`-------`----------
platform                 EOL code  control  decimal hexadecimal
---------------------------------------------------------
Debian (unix)            LF        `\^J`    10      0A
MSDOS and Windows        CR-LF     `\^M\^J` 13 10   0D 0A
Apple@@@sq@@@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: 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: Most editors (eg. `vim`, `emacs`, `gedit`, ...) can handle files in MSDOS style EOL transparently.

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.

==== TAB conversion

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

.List of TAB conversion commands from `bsdmainutils` and `coreutils` packages
[grid="all"]
`------------------------`--------------`-----------
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.

==== 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 "`@@@plus@@@@@@plus@@@enc`" and "`@@@plus@@@@@@plus@@@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 @@@plus@@@@@@plus@@@enc=utf8 new.txt`".

Please refer to the mbyte.txt "multi-byte text support" in `vim` on-line help and <<list-of-encoding-values>> for locale values used with "`++enc`".

The `emacs` family of programs can perform the equivalent functions.

//# I do not know easy description for EMACS.  Please update this for EMACS.

==== 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.

.List of tools to extract plain text data
[grid="all"]
`-----------`-------------`------------`----------------`--------------------------------------------------------------------
package     popcon        size         keyword          function
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`w3m`       @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ html->text       HTML to text converter with the "`w3m -dump`" command
`html2text` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ html->text       advanced HTML to text converter (ISO 8859-1)
`lynx`      @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ html->text       HTML to text converter with the "`lynx -dump`" command
`elinks`    @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ html->text       HTML to text converter with the "`elinks -dump`" command
`links`     @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ html->text       HTML to text converter with the "`links -dump`" command
`links2`    @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ html->text       HTML to text converter with the "`links2 -dump`" command
`antiword`  @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ MSWord->text,ps  convert MSWord files to plain text or ps
`catdoc`    @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ MSWord->text,TeX convert MSWord files to plain text or TeX
`pstotext`  @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ ps/pdf->text     extract text from PostScript and PDF files
`unhtml`    @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ html->text       remove the markup tags from an HTML file
`odt2txt`   @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ odt->text        converter from OpenDocument Text to text
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

==== Highlighting and formatting plain text data

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

.List of tools to highlight plain text data
[grid="all"]
`------------------`-------------`------------`-----------`-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
package            popcon        size         keyword     description
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`vim-runtime`      @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ highlight   Vim MACRO to convert source code to HTML with "`:source $VIMRUNTIME/syntax/html.vim`"
`cxref`            @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ c->html     converter for the C program to latex and HTML (C language)
`src2tex`          @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ highlight   convert many source codes to TeX (C language)
`source-highlight` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ highlight   convert many source codes to HTML, XHTML, LaTeX, Texinfo, ANSI color escape sequences and DocBook files with highlight (C++)
`highlight`        @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ highlight   convert many source codes to HTML, XHTML, RTF, LaTeX, TeX or XSL-FO files with highlight (C++)
`grc`              @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->color generic colouriser for everything (Python)
`txt2html`         @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->html  text to HTML converter (Perl)
`markdown`         @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->html  markdown text document formatter to (X)HTML (Perl)
`asciidoc`         @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->any   AsciiDoc text document formatter to XML/HTML (Python)
`pandoc`           @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->any   general markup converter (Haskell)
`python-docutils`  @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->any   ReStructured Text document formatter to XML (Python)
`txt2tags`         @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->any   document conversion from text to HTML, SGML, LaTeX, man page, MoinMoin, Magic Point and PageMaker (Python)
`udo`              @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->any   universal document - text processing utility (C language)
`stx2any`          @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->any   document converter from structured plain text to other formats (m4)
`rest2web`         @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->html  document converter from ReStructured Text to html (Python)
`aft`              @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->any   "free form" document preparation system (Perl)
`yodl`             @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->any   pre-document language and tools to process it (C language)
`sdf`              @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->any   simple document parser (Perl)
`sisu`             @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->any   document structuring, publishing and search framework (Ruby)
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

=== XML data

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XML[The Extensible Markup Language (XML)] is a markup language for documents containing structured information.

See introductory information at http://xml.com/[XML.COM].

- http://www.xml.com/pub/a/98/10/guide0.html["What is XML?"]
- http://xml.com/pub/a/2000/08/holman/index.html["What Is XSLT?"]
- http://xml.com/pub/a/2002/03/20/xsl-fo.html["What Is XSL-FO?"]
- http://xml.com/pub/a/2000/09/xlink/index.html["What Is XLink?"]

==== Basic hints for XML

XML text looks somewhat like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/HTML[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.

.List of predefined entities for XML
[grid="all"]
`-----------------`------------------------------
predefined entity character to be converted into
-------------------------------------------------
`&quot;`          `"` : quote
`&apos;`          `'` : apostrophe
`&lt;`            `<` : less-than
`&gt;`            `>` : greater-than
`&amp;`           `&` : ampersand
-------------------------------------------------

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

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: 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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Transformations[Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)].

==== XML processing

There are many tools available to process XML files such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extensible_Stylesheet_Language[the Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL)].

Basically, once you create well formed XML file, you can convert it to any format using http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Transformations[Extensible Stylesheet Language Transformations (XSLT)].

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/XSL_Formatting_Objects[Extensible Stylesheet Language for Formatting Objects (XSL-FO)] is supposed to be solution for formatting. The `fop` package is new to the Debian `main` archive due to its dependence to the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Java_(programming_language)[Java programing language]. 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.


.List of XML tools
[grid="all"]
`-------------`-------------`------------`----------`-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
package       popcon        size         keyword    description
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`docbook-xml` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ xml        XML document type definition (DTD) for DocBook
`xsltproc`    @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ xslt       XSLT command line processor (XML-> XML, HTML, plain text, etc.)
`docbook-xsl` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ xml/xslt   XSL stylesheets for processing DocBook XML to various output formats with XSLT
`xmlto`       @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ xml/xslt   XML-to-any converter with XSLT
`dbtoepub`    @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ xml/xslt   DocBook XML to .epub converter
`dblatex`     @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ xml/xslt   convert Docbook files to DVI, PostScript, PDF documents with XSLT
`fop`         @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ xml/xsl-fo convert Docbook XML files to PDF
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Since XML is subset of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SGML[Standard Generalized Markup Language (SGML)], it can be processed by the extensive tools available for SGML, such as http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Document_Style_Semantics_and_Specification_Language[Document Style Semantics and Specification Language (DSSSL)].

.List of DSSSL tools
[grid="all"]
`---------------`-------------`------------`----------`-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------
package         popcon        size         keyword    description
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`openjade`      @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ dsssl      ISO/IEC 10179:1996 standard DSSSL processor (latest)
`docbook-dsssl` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ xml/dsssl  DSSSL stylesheets for processing DocBook XML to various output formats with DSSSL
`docbook-utils` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ xml/dsssl  utilities for DocBook files including conversion to other formats (HTML, RTF, PS, man, PDF) with `docbook2\*` commands with DSSSL
`sgml2x`        @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ SGML/dsssl converter from SGML and XML using DSSSL stylesheets
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TIP: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNOME[GNOME]'s `yelp` is sometimes handy to read http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/DocBook[DocBook] XML files directly since it renders decently on X.

==== The XML data extraction

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

.List of XML data extraction tools
[grid="all"]
`-----------`-------------`------------`------------------`------------------------------------------------------------------
package     popcon        size         keyword            description
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`wv`        @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ MSWord->any        document converter from Microsoft Word to HTML, LaTeX, etc.
`texi2html` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ texi->html         converter from Texinfo to HTML
`man2html`  @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ manpage->html      converter from manpage to HTML (CGI support)
`unrtf`     @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ rtf->html          document converter from RTF to HTML, etc
`info2www`  @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ info->html         converter from GNU info to HTML (CGI support)
`ooo2dbk`   @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ sxw->xml           converter from OpenOffice.org SXW documents to DocBook XML
`wp2x`      @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ WordPerfect->any   WordPerfect 5.0 and 5.1 files to TeX, LaTeX, troff, GML and HTML
`doclifter` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ 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.

.List of XML pretty print tools
[grid="all"]
`---------------`-------------`------------`------------------`---------------------------------------------------------------------------
package         popcon        size         keyword            description
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`libxml2-utils` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ xml<->html<->xhtml command line XML tool with `xmllint`(1) (syntax check, reformat, lint, ...)
`tidy`          @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ 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.

=== Type setting

The Unix http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff[troff] program originally developed by AT&T can be used for simple typesetting.  It is usually used to create manpages.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX[TeX] created by Donald Knuth is a very powerful type setting tool and is the de facto standard. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX[LaTeX] originally written by Leslie Lamport enables a high-level access to the power of TeX.

.List of type setting tools
[grid="all"]
`--------------`-------------`------------`-------`----------------------------------------------------
package        popcon        size         keyword description
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`texlive`      @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ (La)TeX TeX system for typesetting, previewing and printing
`groff`        @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ troff   GNU troff text-formatting system
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

==== roff typesetting

Traditionally, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Roff[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`" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Macro_(computer_science)[macro] in "`/usr/share/doc/groff/`" by installing the `groff` package.

TIP: "`groff -Tascii -me -`" produces plain text output with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ANSI_escape_code[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: To remove "^H" and "_" from a text file generated by `groff`, filter it by "`col -b -x`".

==== TeX/LaTeX

The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX_Live[TeX Live] software distribution offers a complete TeX system.  The `texlive` metapackage provides a decent selection of the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX_Live[TeX Live] packages which should suffice for the most common tasks.

There are many references available for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TeX[TeX] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX[LaTeX].

- http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/TeTeX-HOWTO.html[The teTeX HOWTO: The Linux-teTeX Local Guide]
- `tex`(1)
- `latex`(1)
- `texdoc`(1)
- `texdoctk`(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 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Standard_Generalized_Markup_Language[SGML] processors use this as their back end text processor.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lyx[Lyx] provided by the `lyx` package and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GNU_TeXmacs[GNU TeXmacs] provided by the `texmacs` package offer nice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WYSIWYG[WYSIWYG] editing environment for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LaTeX[LaTeX] while many use http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emacs[Emacs] and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vim_(text_editor)[Vim] as the choice for the source editor.

There are many online resources available.

- The TEX Live Guide - TEX Live 2007 ("`/usr/share/doc/texlive-doc-base/english/texlive-en/live.html`") (`texlive-doc-base` package)
- http://www.stat.rice.edu/\~helpdesk/howto/lyxguide.html[A Simple Guide to Latex/Lyx]
- http://www-h.eng.cam.ac.uk/help/tpl/textprocessing/latex_basic/latex_basic.html[Word Processing Using LaTeX]
- http://supportweb.cs.bham.ac.uk/documentation/LaTeX/lguide/local-guide/local-guide.html[Local User Guide to teTeX/LaTeX]

// * A Quick Introduction to LaTeX: [http://www.msu.edu/user/pfaffben/writings/]

// The following needs to be checked.

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

==== 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
--------------------

==== Creating a manual page

Although writing a manual page (manpage) in the plain http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Troff[troff] format is possible, there are few helper packages to create it.


.List of packages to help creating the manpage
[grid="all"]
`----------------`-------------`------------`-------------`-----------------------------------------------------
package          popcon        size         keyword       description
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`docbook-to-man` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ SGML->manpage converter from DocBook SGML into roff man macros
`help2man`       @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->manpage automatic manpage generator from --help
`info2man`       @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ info->manpage converter from GNU info to POD or man pages
`txt2man`        @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->manpage convert flat ASCII text to man page format
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

=== Printable data

Printable data is expressed in the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript[PostScript] format on the Debian system.   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Unix_Printing_System[Common Unix Printing System (CUPS)] uses Ghostscript as its rasterizer backend program for non-PostScript printers.

==== Ghostscript

The core of printable data manipulation is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostscript[Ghostscript] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript[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.


.List of Ghostscript PostScript interpreters
[grid="all"]
`-------------------`-------------`------------`------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
package             popcon        size         description
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`ghostscript`       @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostscript[The GPL Ghostscript PostScript/PDF interpreter]
`ghostscript-x`     @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ GPL Ghostscript PostScript/PDF interpreter - X display support
`@libpoppler@`      @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ PDF rendering library forked from the xpdf PDF viewer
`libpoppler-glib8`  @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ PDF rendering library (GLib-based shared library)
`poppler-data`      @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ CMaps for PDF rendering library (for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CJK_characters[CJK] support: Adobe-\*)
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TIP: "`gs -h`" can display the configuration of Ghostscript.

==== Merge two PS or PDF files

You can merge two http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript[PostScript (PS)] or http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format[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: The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portable_Document_Format[PDF], which is a widely used cross-platform printable data format, is essentially the compressed  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PostScript[PS] format with few additional features and extensions.

TIP: For command line, `psmerge`(1) and other commands from the `psutils` package are useful for manipulating PostScript documents.  `pdftk`(1) from the `pdftk` package is useful for manipulating PDF documents, too.

==== Printable data utilities

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

.List of printable data utilities
[grid="all"]
`---------------`-------------`------------`-------------------`--------------------------------------------------------------------------
package         popcon        size         keyword             description
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`poppler-utils` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ pdf->ps,text,...    PDF utilities: `pdftops`, `pdfinfo`, `pdfimages`, `pdftotext`, `pdffonts`
`psutils`       @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ ps->ps              PostScript document conversion tools
`poster`        @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ ps->ps              create large posters out of PostScript pages
`enscript`      @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->ps, html, rtf convert ASCII text to PostScript, HTML, RTF or Pretty-Print
`a2ps`          @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->ps            'Anything to PostScript' converter and pretty-printer
`pdftk`         @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ pdf->pdf            PDF document conversion tool: `pdftk`
`html2ps`       @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ html->ps            converter from HTML to PostScript
`gnuhtml2latex` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ html->latex         converter from html to latex
`latex2rtf`     @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ latex->rtf          convert documents from LaTeX to RTF which can be read by MS Word
`ps2eps`        @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ ps->eps             converter from PostScript to EPS (Encapsulated PostScript)
`e2ps`          @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->ps            Text to PostScript converter with Japanese encoding support
`impose+`       @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ ps->ps              PostScript utilities
`trueprint`     @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ text->ps            pretty print many source codes (C, C++, Java, Pascal, Perl, Pike, Sh, and Verilog) to PostScript. (C language)
`pdf2svg`       @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ ps->svg             converter from PDF to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics[Scalable vector graphics] format
`pdftoipe`      @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ ps->ipe             converter from PDF to IPE@@@sq@@@s XML format
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

==== Printing with CUPS

Both `lp`(1) and `lpr`(1) commands offered by http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_Unix_Printing_System[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 http://localhost:631/help/options.html[Command-Line Printing and Options].

=== The mail data conversion

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

.List of packages to help mail data conversion
[grid="all"]
`------------`-------------`------------`------------`------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
package      popcon        size         keyword      description
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`sharutils`  @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ mail         `shar`(1), `unshar`(1), `uuencode`(1), `uudecode`(1)
`mpack`      @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ MIME         encoding and decoding of http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME[MIME] messages: `mpack`(1) and `munpack`(1)
`tnef`       @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ ms-tnef      unpacking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME[MIME] attachments of type "application/ms-tnef" which is a Microsoft only format
`uudeview`   @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ mail         encoder and decoder for the following formats: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uuencoding[uuencode], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xxencode[xxencode], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64[BASE64], http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quoted-printable[quoted printable], and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BinHex[BinHex]
`readpst`    @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ PST          convert Microsoft http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personal_Folders_(.pst)_file[Outlook PST files] to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mbox[mbox] format
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TIP: The http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Internet_Message_Access_Protocol[Internet Message Access Protocol] version 4 (IMAP4) server (see <<_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.

==== Mail data basics

Mail (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Simple_Mail_Transfer_Protocol[SMTP]) data should be limited to series of 7 bit data.  So binary data and 8 bit text data are encoded into 7 bit format with the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MIME[Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions (MIME)] and the selection of the charset (see <<_basics_of_encoding>>).

The standard mail storage format is mbox formatted according to http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2822[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,  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Base64[Base64] is likely to be used since it contains many 8 bit data.  The situation of other Asian languages is similar.

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 <<_pop3_imap4_server>>).

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.

=== Graphic data tools

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

.List of graphic data tools
[grid="all"]
`--------------------------`-------------`------------`----------------------`------------------------------------------------------------
package                    popcon        size         keyword                description
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`gimp`                     @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(bitmap)          GNU Image Manipulation Program
`imagemagick`              @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(bitmap)          image manipulation programs
`graphicsmagick`           @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(bitmap)          image manipulation programs (fork of `imagemagick`)
`xsane`                    @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(bitmap)          GTK+-based X11 frontend for SANE (Scanner Access Now Easy)
`netpbm`                   @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(bitmap)          graphics conversion tools
`icoutils`                 @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ png<->ico(bitmap)      convert http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ICO_(icon_image_file_format)[MS Windows icons and cursors to and from PNG formats] (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Favicon[favicon.ico])
`scribus`                  @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ ps/pdf/SVG/...         http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scribus[Scribus] DTP editor
`libreoffice-draw`         @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(vector)          LibreOffice office suite - drawing
`inkscape`                 @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(vector)          http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scalable_Vector_Graphics[SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics)] editor
`dia`                      @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(vector)          diagram editor (Gtk)
`xfig`                     @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(vector)          Facility for Interactive Generation of figures under X11
`pstoedit`                 @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ ps/pdf->image(vector)  PostScript and PDF files to editable vector graphics converter (SVG)
`libwmf-bin`               @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ Windows/image(vector)  Windows metafile (vector graphic data) conversion tools
`fig2sxd`                  @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ fig->sxd(vector)       convert XFig files to OpenOffice.org Draw format
`unpaper`                  @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image->image           post-processing tool for scanned pages for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition[OCR]
`tesseract-ocr`            @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image->text            free http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optical_character_recognition[OCR] software based on the HP@@@sq@@@s commercial OCR engine
`tesseract-ocr-eng`        @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image->text            OCR engine data: tesseract-ocr language files for English text
`gocr`                     @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image->text            free OCR software
`ocrad`                    @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image->text            free OCR software
`eog`                      @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)            Eye of GNOME graphics viewer program
`gthumb`                   @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)            image viewer and browser (GNOME)
`geeqie`                   @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)            image viewer using GTK+
`shotwell`                 @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)            digital photo organizer (GNOME)
`gtkam`                    @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)            application for retrieving media from digital cameras (GTK+)
`gphoto2`                  @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)            The gphoto2 digital camera command-line client
`gwenview`                 @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)            image viewer (KDE)
`kamera`                   @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)            digital camera support for KDE applications
`digikam`                  @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)            digital photo management application for KDE
`exiv2`                    @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)            EXIF/IPTC metadata manipulation tool
`exiftran`                 @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)            transform digital camera jpeg images
`jhead`                    @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)            manipulate the non-image part of Exif compliant JPEG (digital camera photo) files
`exif`                     @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)            command-line utility to show EXIF information in JPEG files
`exiftags`                 @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)            utility to read Exif tags from a digital camera JPEG file
`exifprobe`                @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)            read metadata from digital pictures
`dcraw`                    @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Raw)->ppm        decode raw digital camera images
`findimagedupes`           @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image->fingerprint     find visually similar or duplicate images
`ale`                      @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image->image           merge images to increase fidelity or create mosaics
`imageindex`               @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ image(Exif)->html      generate static HTML galleries from images
`outguess`                 @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ jpeg,png               universal http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steganography[Steganographic] tool
`librecad`                 @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ DXF                    CAD data editor (KDE)
`blender`                  @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ blend, TIFF, VRML, ... 3D content editor for animation etc
`mm3d`                     @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ ms3d, obj, dxf, ...    OpenGL based 3D model editor
`open-font-design-toolkit` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ ttf, ps, ...           metapackage for open font design
`fontforge`                @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ ttf, ps, ...           font editor for PS, TrueType and OpenType fonts
`xgridfit`                 @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ ttf                    program for http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hinting[gridfitting and hinting] TrueType fonts
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

TIP: Search more image tools using regex "`\~Gworks-with::image`" in `aptitude`(8) (see <<_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 via scripts.

The de facto image file format of the digital camera is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exchangeable_image_file_format[Exchangeable Image File Format] (EXIF) which is the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/JPEG[JPEG] image file format with additional metadata tags.  It can hold information such as date, time, and camera settings.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lempel-Ziv-Welch[The Lempel-Ziv-Welch (LZW) lossless data compression] patent has been expired.  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphics_Interchange_Format[Graphics Interchange Format (GIF)] utilities which use the LZW compression method are now freely available on the Debian system.

TIP: Any digital camera or scanner with removable recording media works with Linux through http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/USB_flash_drive[USB storage] readers since it follows the http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_rule_for_Camera_File_system[Design rule for Camera Filesystem] and uses http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File_Allocation_Table[FAT] filesystem. See <<_removable_storage_device>>.

=== Miscellaneous data conversion

There are many other programs for converting data. Following packages caught my eyes using regex "`\~Guse::converting`" in `aptitude`(8) (see <<_search_method_options_with_aptitude>>).

.List of miscellaneous data conversion tools
[grid="all"]
`-----------`-------------`------------`------------`-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
package     popcon        size         keyword      description
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
`alien`     @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ rpm/tgz->deb converter for the foreign package into the Debian package
`freepwing` @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ EB->EPWING   converter from "Electric Book" (popular in Japan) to a single http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/JIS_X_4081[JIS X 4081] format (a subset of the http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPWING[EPWING] V1)
`calibre`   @-@popcon1@-@ @-@psize1@-@ any->EPUB    e-book converter and library management
------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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

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

