ttxcat

A command-line application that prints a Teletext page to the console.

Maps the Teletext characters to Unicode and color control sequences.

Examples

Show file contents

Print a teletext page stored in a binary file:

Source: zxnet.co.uk

URL format

You can also read the page data from a URL to an online Teletext editor. Note that the data is encoded in the URL. There is no network traffic.

(Source: Teletext editor at zxnet.co.uk)

Test page

Engineering test page (source: MODE 7 Teletext Test Pages). Note that characters are mapped from the English character subset to Unicode:

Show attributes

To see how a page is made, you can print the raw control codes known as "spacing attributes":

Source: zxnet.co.uk

Installation

With Cargo:

cargo install ttxcat

Features

The current version of ttxcat:

• Understands all of the attributes in the level 1 Teletext specification.
• Accepts control codes for changing the background and foreground colors.
• Maps mosaic graphics to the corresponding Unicode characters.
• Maps alphanumeric characters according to the national subset (English).

Missing features:

• Cannot print separated mosaic graphics as there are no Unicode characters for them.
• Does not handle double-height characters.
• Does not handle blinking characters.
• Shows parts of the page that are supposed to be concealed by default.

Usage

Full usage is provided by the --help flag:

$ ttxcat --help
Print Teletext pages on the standard output.

Read the INPUT files given and prints their contents. With no INPUT, read standard input.

Also supports a URL in the format used by the online Teletext editor edit.tf.

In the url format, INPUT is a URL that contains all the data; there is no network traffic.

Unless the --format option is given, guess the format depending on INPUT. If INPUT starts with http: or https:, assumes --format=url. If INPUT ends with .hex, assumes --format=hex. Otherwise, assumes --format=raw.

Usage: ttxcat [OPTIONS] [INPUT]...

Arguments:
  [INPUT]...
          Filenames or, for the URL format, URLs

Options:
  -f, --format <FORMAT>
          Format of the input

          Possible values:
          - raw: Teletext characters as raw bytes
          - hex: Teletext characters as raw data in hexadecimal
          - url: Encoding used by edit.tf: either only the base64 encoded characters, or a complete URL

  -s, --show-attributes
          Print the attributes as text (e.g. for debugging)

  -h, --help
          Print help (see a summary with '-h')

  -V, --version
          Print version