Beyond Browsing the Web
07/05/2000In addition to viewing URLs in the standard Web browsers, there are other useful ways of getting and using Web data on Linux systems right now. Here are a few of them.
Viewing images from the Web
If you want to view an image file that's on the Web, and you know
its URL, you don't have to start a Web browser to do it -- give the
URL as an argument to display, part of the
ImageMagick suite of imaging tools (available in the Debian
imagemagick package or here).
For example, to view the image at ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/garbo-gifs/garbo01.gif, type:
display ftp://garbo.uwasa.fi/garbo-gifs/garbo01.gifClick the right mouse button to get a menu; from there, you can save the image to a file if you want to.
Reading text from the Web
If I want to read the text of an article that's on the Web, and I
just want the text and not the Web design, I'll often grab the URL
with the lynx
browser using the -dump option. This dumps the text of the given URL
to the standard output; then I can pipe the output to
less for perusal, or use redirection to save it to a
file.
http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/winterd/winter.html,
type:
lynx -dump http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/winterd/winter.html | lessIt's an old Net convention for italicized words to be displayed in
an etext
inside underscores like _this_; use the -underscore option to output
any italicized text in this manner.
By default, lynx numbers all the hyperlinks and
produces a list of footnoted links at the bottom of the screen. If you
don't want them, add the -nolist option, and just the pure text will be
returned.
To output the pure text, with underscores, of the above URL to the
file winter_dreams, type (without the line break):
lynx -dump -underscore
http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/winterd/winter.html > winter_dreamsOr pipe the output to enscript
to make a nice printout of it (again, don't enter the line breaks shown here):
lynx -dump -underscore
http://www.sc.edu/fitzgerald/winterd/winter.html |
enscript -B -f "Times-Roman10"Pages: 1, 2 |
