I often convert various document formats to plain text because the conversion is generally easier than trying to navigate a program that can read the document in its original format. Problem is, even when the document is in English or another language that uses the Roman Alphabet, the converted .txt contains characters my text-mode screen reader can't read properly(pronouncing the character as "thorn") Things like left and right double curly quotes and single right curly quotes are the most common offenders, which also screws up my screen reader's pronunciation of contractions and possessive, though things like ellipsis, em-dashes, and accented letters also cause problems. Most of these problems can be fixed manually, though it means I often spend as much time correcting the file as I do reading it. I know how to use sed to do global search and replace on plain text files, at least where both the string to be found and the string it's to be replaced with can be typed, but most of the replacements I'd like to make have search strings containing characters not on my keyboard. So, how do I tell sed to replace a left double curly quote with a straight double quote, an ellipsis with three periods, or an e with an acute accent with a normal e among other such things? And if this is beyond sed's capabilities, could someone suggest another command line tool that can automate this task? -- Sincerely, Jeffery Wright Bachelor of Computer Science President Emeritus, Nu Nu Chapter, Phi Theta Kappa. Former Secretary, Student Government Association, College of the Albemarle. _______________________________________________ Blinux-list mailing list Blinux-list@xxxxxxxxxx https://www.redhat.com/mailman/listinfo/blinux-list