Umlaut Translator

umlaut is depricated by now. Please use chr2str instead.

Description

Imagine the following situation: When receiving German texts containing umlaut characters the latter may not be properly displayed in a Unix terminal window or output device. Furthermore, a simple search and replace of individual characters does only make sense if the translation relation between input and output is known. Having to deal with several sources of information, i. e. text processors and/or machine platforms, these relations may vary depending on the source.

The umlaut utility allows you to specify the type of input and output seperately. The input filter is responsible for selecting the individual characters. This filter consists of associations of the seven umlauts, Ä, ä, Ö, ö, Ü, ü and ß to certain values, that is, if such a value occurs in the input stream it is dealt with as a umlaut character. Recognized umlaut characters are then passed on to the second filter, the output filter (see below). None-umlaut characters are simply forwarded to the output. Apart from the built-in default associations the individual definitions may be specified on the command line or a special definition file.

The second filter manipulates the utility's output behaviour. At present, translations to ASCII-sequences, HTML, TeX and LaTeX are supported. ASCII-sequences mean that individual character values are transferred to one of the strings 'Ae', 'ae', 'Oe', 'oe', 'Ue', 'ue' or 'sz'. HTML-sequences replace single values by Ä and ä instead of 'Ae', 'ae', a.s.o. TeX and LaTex control sequences for umlauts are \"A or \"a and "A or "a, respectively.

Additionally to the character translation individual characters can simply be thrown away, if their value exceeds 127. This option garantees 7-bit-clean output.

Manual

Online manual.

Download

The latest version is umlaut-0.12.tar.gz.