Re: How to create a PDF-Printer from the command line
On Sun 07 Jan 2018 at 18:15:06 (+0000), Brian wrote:
> On Sun 07 Jan 2018 at 07:46:30 -0500, rhkramer@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.
Reply to: