nato-phonetic-alphabet

Printable / Remixable Nato Phonetic Alphabet page with a beautiful command-line interface.

Project page is hosted at https://trtmn.io/nato-phonetic-alphabet

Command Line Interface

A beautiful and easy-to-use CLI built with Python 3.11, Click, and Rich for displaying and working with the NATO phonetic alphabet.

Features

• 🎨 Beautiful Output: Rich terminal formatting with colors and styling
• 🔍 Search & Lookup: Find phonetic equivalents for letters and words
• 📝 Interactive Mode: Spell out words interactively
• 🖨️ Printable Output: Generate formatted output for printing
• 🚀 Fast & Lightweight: Built with modern Python libraries

Installation

Option 1: uv / uvx (Recommended)

Try it once without installing:

uvx phonetic-nato

Install it as a persistent CLI:

uv tool install phonetic-nato

Don't have uv yet? See the uv install guide (one-line installer for macOS, Linux, and Windows).

Option 2: pip

pip install phonetic-nato

From source (development)

git clone https://codeberg.org/trtmn/nato-phonetic-alphabet.git
cd nato-phonetic-alphabet
uv sync --dev
uv run phonetic --help

Usage

Basic Commands

Display the full NATO phonetic alphabet:

phonetic

Look up a specific letter:

phonetic lookup A

Spell out a word:

phonetic spell "HELLO"

Interactive spelling mode:

phonetic interactive

Generate printable output:

phonetic print --output nato-alphabet.txt

Command Options

phonetic --help

Available commands:

• lookup <letter> - Find phonetic equivalent for a single letter
• spell <word> - Spell out a word using NATO phonetic alphabet
• interactive - Enter interactive mode for spelling words
• print - Generate formatted output for printing
• list - Display the complete NATO phonetic alphabet
• open [slug] - Download (or reuse) a printable asset and open it with the OS default handler. Default slug is the portrait PDF.
• download [slug] - Download a printable asset to ~/Downloads (use --list to see slugs, -o for a custom directory, --force to re-download)

Examples

# Look up a letter
phonetic lookup X
# Output: X - X-ray

# Spell a word
phonetic spell "WORLD"
# Output: W - Whiskey, O - Oscar, R - Romeo, L - Lima, D - Delta

# Interactive mode
phonetic interactive
# Enter words to spell them out interactively

Printable assets

The project ships printable PDFs, an EPub, Word/ODT documents, and Apple Pages sources alongside the source on Codeberg. The CLI can grab any of them straight to your Downloads folder.

# Open the portrait PDF (downloads to ~/Downloads, then opens in your default viewer)
phonetic open

# Other printable variants
phonetic open pdf-landscape
phonetic open epub

# Download without opening
phonetic download docx
phonetic download odt -o ~/Documents/nato/

# See every available asset
phonetic download --list

# Re-download a stale copy
phonetic open --force

Available slugs: pdf, pdf-landscape, epub, docx.

Development

Project Structure

nato-phonetic-alphabet/
├── .venv/                 # Virtual environment
├── src/                   # Source code
│   └── nato_phonetic/     # Main package
├── tests/                 # Test files
├── requirements.txt       # Python dependencies
├── pyproject.toml         # Project configuration
└── README.md             # This file

Running Tests

pytest tests/

Regenerating printable assets

The printable PDFs, DOCX, and EPub files in the repo root are generated from scripts/build_assets/. They must stay in sync with the generator — CI fails the build otherwise.

make build-assets

Recommended: enable the pre-push hook so a stale-asset push is caught locally before CI rejects it:

git config core.hooksPath .githooks

Alternative: integrate with the pre-commit framework by adding to your .pre-commit-config.yaml:

- repo: local
  hooks:
    - id: build-assets
      name: regenerate printable assets
      entry: make build-assets
      language: system
      pass_filenames: false
      stages: [pre-push]

If you only edit the alphabet data or the layout config in scripts/build_assets/config.py, run make build-assets before committing.

Contributing

1. Fork the repository
2. Create a feature branch
3. Make your changes
4. Add tests for new functionality
5. Submit a pull request

Dependencies

• Click: Command-line interface creation kit
• Rich: Rich text and beautiful formatting in the terminal
• Python 3.11+: Modern Python features and performance

License

This project is open source. See the LICENSE file for details.