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Re: ascii formatting package



There is a powerful perl program which converts
text to pdf directly, called "txt2pdf".

This is a shareware.  I forget the URL, but the
link is available at  freshmeat.net.  As far as
I recall it was from Sanface Software.

I tried it a few months ago ... pretty good.

USM Bish

On Fri, Jun 08, 2001 at 10:05:23AM -0700, Robert L. Yelvington wrote:
> thanks for the suggestion, HH!  i believe that the perl option is better
> for me, text process the ascii doc via perl...
> 
> sincerely,
> ~robt
> 
> Harry Henry Gebel wrote:
> > 
> > On Thu, Jun 07, 2001 at 06:39:22PM -0700, Robert L. Yelvington wrote:
> > > can anyone suggest a good package to format ascii docs to be converted
> > > to pdf?
> > 
> > > what i am looking for is something that can outline blocks of text with
> > > boxes, selectively shade lines or single words as wells bold, italicize,
> > > underline text, etc.
> > 
> > > i have looked into enscript...but can't figure out how to make it do
> > > what I want it to do(YET!!!!)...
> > 
> > > the formatting has got to be done on the fly, from cron for instance and
> > > I guess I could use standard
> > > PCL or PS and write it myself, but am hoping that there's a simpler (and
> > > less time consuming) way to do this...
> > 
> > If you adopted formatting guidelines for the ascii text (for example, one
> > blank line is a paragraph, two is a section, three is a chapter, text after
> > an underscore is underlined, etc.) it wouldn't be too hard to write a
> > script in Python or Perl to convert it to docbook; the docbook could then
> > be converted to pdf using any of several tools; alternatively there is a
> > Python library that can generate PDF files directly, so you could write a
> > Python script to generate the PDF directly from the ascii text.
> > 
> > --
> > Harry Henry Gebel
> > West Dover Hundred, Delaware
> > GPG encrypted email gladly accepted. Key ID: B853FFFE
> > Fingerprint: 15A6 F58D AEED 5680 B41A  61FE 5A5F BB51 B853 FFFE
> > 
> >   ------------------------------------------------------------------------
> >    Part 1.2Type: application/pgp-signature




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