Many consoles add some extra codes to the text that is displayed through them. These hidden codes change the way that text is displayed on the screen. For example, these codes can make the text look bolder, make it become brighter, change the color of the text’s foreground or background etc.
When you copy text from these consoles, these codes also get copied along with the plain text content. When copied in some other text editors or consoles, these codes might cause problem as they are either not recognized or they are processed in a manner different from the original console.
Using a freeware program Ansifilter, we can filter these special text codes out easily. This software can also perform many more operations as well. We have to begin by opening the text file in the Ansifilter window. When this step is complete, we can either copy the filtered text to the clipboard or convert the text into a different format and save it as a file. For example, we can choose one of the output formats such as HTML, RTF, LaTeX, TeX, BBCode, SVG or Pango Backup.
Depending on the output format selected, we can choose many different options. For example, we can chose to remove the styling, version information, header, footer, or the Clear sequences from the original text. The program also supports adding ANSI text art which was very popular in 80s and early 90s. For ANSI art, we can choose a monospace font, the font size, and the dimensions of the text document.
Other than the GUI application, Ansifilter also comes in a CLI version but is difficult to use. We can do everything from the GUI that we could do from the CLI version. The only advantage of using the CLI version is that we can create batch scripts to automate processing of the text files and creating of the output files.
You can download Ansifilter from http://www.andre-simon.de/.