---
name: "tran"
section: "1"
platform: "linux"
package: "tran"
version: "5-3"
release: "Debian 13 (Trixie)"
platforms: ["linux"]
url: "https://new.carta.tech/tran"
---

# tran(1)

transcribe between character scripts

## NAME

tran - transcribe between character scripts

## SYNOPSIS

**tran** \<*input*

**echo** Hello world **\|** **tran** *script*

## DESCRIPTION

**tran** lets you convert between Latin and a number of other character scripts.  It works as a filter, reading standard input and writing to the standard output.

Please specify the target script as the argument.  If none is given, the default is latin.  Specify "*list*" to get the list of supported scripts.

## OPTIONS

- **-d**, **--debug**

  marks characters that haven't been touched in color.  The output must go to a terminal, "**less -R**" or something that can understand ANSI colors.

## CAVEATS

There is currently no triangulation -- to go between two scripts other than latin you need to convert to latin first.

This especially matters for *ascii*: to convert, eg, cyrillic text, you need to use a pipe: **tran\|tran ascii**.

The *ascii* conversion, like any other, leaves characters it doesn't have data for intact, leading to non-ASCII output.  This might be what you want if you need to just drop diacritics and expand digraphs, but if you're after pure 7-bit text, use "**tran ascii\|perl -CIO -pe 'tr /\\x1-\\x7e/?/c'**" (**/usr/bin/tr** works on bytes not characters).

Not all of your recipients may have all required fonts, especially for Plane 1 scripts.  Such support is especially bad on old terminals that use bitmap fonts, such as *xterm*, text-mode Linux or pre-Windows 10 console.

## BUGS

Ancient (ie, non-Unicode) charsets are not supported at all.  **tran** will obliviously write UTF-8 even when inappropriate.

This tool is pretty slow, especially on startup.  If this is a problem for anyone, please holler -- I did not optimize it at all.

## AUTHOR

Adam Borowski (kilobyte@angband.pl)