On Sun 07 Jan 2018 at 18:15:06 (+0000), Brian wrote: > On Sun 07 Jan 2018 at 07:46:30 -0500, rhkra...@gmail.com wrote: > > > I know this is not directly on point to the OP's question as subsequently > > But it does treat conversion of files to PDFs, so you are not way off > base. Look at the variety of techniques people use: paps, a2ps, > enscript, cupsfilter, ps2pdf, unoconv etc. There probably isn't one > tried and trusted method which suits everyone; and we haven't exhausted > discussion of them all and how they could fit into a printing system. > > > clarified, but I would point out that a variety of programs like txt2pdf > > exist > > (and work)--I assume, but don't know that they are available in the various > > Debian distros. > > Which txt2pdf? I tried the DFSG free one at > > https://github.com/baruchel/txt2pdf > > Not in Debian, AFAICT, but download, put in /usr/local/bin and install > python-reportlab. Gives searchable PDFs, fonts can be selected more > easily than with cupsfilter or cups-pdf and it has UTF-8 support. Looks > useful.
Indeed. It seems a lot faster than paps+ps2pdf too. I can see myself using this, though I'll keep my paps function as well, as it appears to be able to make substitutions for missing glyphs. It's handy to have a function that prints *something* at every position (except the strip at 0x80), with those little blobs containing 4 hex chars where there's no glyph. paps also does columns. The default fault in txt2pdf is Courier→Nimbus Mono AFAICT, which is very limited. The unifont TTF font has far more characters, but the quality is very poor (deliberately, but looks like a bitmapped font). I also haven't figured out line-numbering: I'll have to study the script. Searchability is a useful extra (I'm used to just searching the original text source file). BTW a2ps, suggested earlier, is another that failed to move to Unicode AIUI. A shame as it had lots of useful column/custom heading stuff. Cheers, David.
