---
title: preserves-tool
---
The `preserves-tool` program is a swiss army knife for translating
Preserves document syntax to and from various surface syntaxes, for
stripping annotations, and for pretty-printing.
It reads Preserves `Value`s (either a fixed number (`--count`) or
until EOF (`--all`)) from `stdin`, autodetecting binary or text syntax
for each by default, and prints the same `Value`s either using the
same or a different Preserves syntax on `stdout`. By default, it will
print using text syntax with pretty-printing.
## Installation
Install Racket. Then, `raco pkg install preserves`.
## Usage
usage: preserves-tool [