txt2*: A few conversion tools

PDF tools were in abundance a few months ago, and I have a short list of two or three conversion tools that work with plain text files. I have intentionally left out a couple that I feel were too esoteric to mention, such as converters to specific cellphone formats. I am sure there are others; this is just my small collection that starts with txt2*. …

txt2tags:

In the spirit of markdown and pandoc, txt2tags relies on simple a markup system to convert from plain text to coded HTML, LaTeX, Mediawiki, ASCII art and about a dozen other formats. txt2tags isn’t hard to learn, and is probably familiar if you’ve used any wiki-type sites in the past. Get a taste of it on the example page.

txt2html

This should do something similar to txt2tags, but because of some inconsistencies in a dependency, I couldn’t get anything but error messages from the AUR version. Something tells me those issues will be ironed out in the near future; for that reason I’ve listed it here instead of dumping it at the end of the T section.

txt2man

I’ve never worked with man pages aside from reading them, so I don’t know much about how to code or arrange them. Which is probably just as well, considering my feeble expertise beyond installing and running a program. txt2man claims to convert plain text documents into a format used by the man page system, and as you can see above, it does send the proper output. But where you go after building that file is a mystery to me.

txt2latex

I also have no experience with LaTeX, although I have a vague idea of what it does and how it should work. txt2latex, as you might imagine, converts standard ASCII text into LaTeX formatted files, as you can see above. Of course, I don’t know what the heck I’m doing with LaTeX, so my output is egregiously silly.

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I can’t really attest for any one of these programs, and from my uninitiated viewpoint, txt2tags seems to encompass everything the others do, plus more. It may be that there is some benefit to using one of the others instead of txt2tags, but if that’s the case I’ll leave it to you do discover.

Naturally, this list doesn’t cover anything that ends with *2txt, so it could be we’re missing out on an entire sphere of text-based software. Pity. …