3.2 Using avatarsay as fancy text-viewer.

The program avatarsay can be used as a fancy text-viewer. If you have a textfile, say mytext, then you can read it with the command ‘avatarsay mytext’. Try it! Now! ;-)

That is easy, isn't it? Well, if your text file is not encoded in the right encoding for your system, you might have trouble with non-ASCII characters. There are different encodings. The most commonly used encodings are ISO-8859-1 (also known as Latin-1) and UTF-8. So if you have trouble with non-English characters, try to use the parameter --encoding=UTF-8 or --encoding=ISO-8859-1 — like this: ‘avatarsay --encoding=ISO-8859-1 mytext’.

Now, sometimes you might not want to show the whole in one continuous stream. So you can structure your text by including a stripline. A stripline is a line like this: ‘---------’. The line must start at the very first column and there must be at least three successive hyphens (U+002D). Of course you can use more than three ones. When avatarsay sees a stripline, it waits a moment and then it starts a new page.