This program allows using letters from some foreign languages and diacritical marks by introducing them as combinations of symbols. As an example, an accented "a" (á) can be written as "\'a" in the source file, and the program will convert it to "á" in the destination file. It is possible to include shorthands for a few languages (Spanish, French and German); for instance, if the Spanish shorthands are included, the accented "a" can be written as "'a". The destination file uses ISO-Latin-1 codes by default, but it is also possible to select other codifications: Roman-8 (used in some printers), and extended ASCII code pages 437 and 850 (used in PCs). The program is also capable to do an inverse conversion, from ISO-Latin-1 codes to symbol combinations, and include an indent prefix as used for quoting e-mail messages that are being replied.
A typical session could be as follows. First we open our mail
with pine, or any other mail program capable to display MIME
quoted-printable messages. If we find a message that we want to reply to,
first we save it as, say, "foo1". Then we use metamail
to convert it from quoted-printable to ISO-Latin-1, and pipe it
to sc2il.pl to convert it to a symbol combination file
(option '-i') and insert the default indent prefix
(option '-p'), and output the result to the
file "foo2" (arguments '-o foo2'):
metamail foo1 | sc2il.pl -i -p -o foo2
Next we edit the file "foo2", as we would do with
any normal email message. Finally we convert it to ISO-Latin-1
(option '-d') and pipe it to pine in order to send
it by mail:
sc2il.pl -d foo2 | pine
If we wanted to print a copy of the original message to a printer
using Roman-8, we do the following ('-cr8' =
"convert to Roman-8"):
metamail foo1 | sc2il.pl -cr8 | lpr
If we also want to print our answer, we can do it as follows
('-ur8' = "use Roman-8"):
sc2il.pl -d -ur8 foo2 | lpr
It is also possible to introduce symbols directly by their ISO-Latin-1 codes.
* Note 1: Before using "sc2il.pl" you may want to know about GNU recode.
* Note 2: "sc2il.pl" requires Perl version 5. I have a modified version here that works with Perl version 4.
Note: The above tgz file contains utdiss1-16.sty as it was when I left UT in May 1998. Shortly after that I made a small correction and renamed it utdiss1-16a.sty.
letter
documentclass. Typical use is as follows:
\documentclass{letter}
\usepackage{mlabels}
.....
\makelabels
...
Use \def\labeltextatt{...} to modify the attributes of text in the labels. Limit the addresses to no more than 5 lines of 30 characters each.
Start -> L L L L (a circle) L -> R L L L R R -> R L R
This sequence of curves converges to a space-filling curve.
'd' = draw a stright line in the current direction 'r' = turn right 60 degrees 'l' = turn left 60 degreesThe initial sequence is 'd', and at each stage each 'd' is replaced with 'dldrrdld'.
Comments, suggestions...? Mail to: mlerma@math.northwestern.edu