Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Sun, 21 Jan 2007, Ron Clarke wrote:

> Hi Sindi,
>
> On Sun, 21 Jan 2007 00:18:35 +0000 (UTC)
> sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:
>
>
> > I could not find other html-to-pdf convertors for linux.

> FWIW:   I use a 3-step process, in BL2.
>
> 1.  I use Phoenix to display the htm file (including graphics if present).
>    Pressing "P" gives a short print dialogue: to printer or to file
>    Choose "file" and edit the filename slot to give a mychoice.ps file.
>
> 2.  I use gs to view the .ps file, and see where the page-breaks fall.
>    If necessary, I edit the original htm file (and repeat 1. above) to make 
> each .ps-file page-break
>    fall at a convenient place (i.e. not in the middle of a paragraph).
>
> 3.  At the console (or in rxvt) I use ps2pdf to convert to the final .PDF 
> file.
>    (type:  ps2pdf mychoice.ps mychoice.pdf)
>    The .ps file is converted to .pdf with all the page-breaks intact.
>    These .PDF files are supplied to my paying clients, so I find the quality 
> is really quite good.
>
>    (ps2pdf is part of  /ap1/ghostsrc.tgz in SW7)

> Regards,
>         Ron

Thanks for the info.  Your method requires Phoenix and ghostscript 
(pstopdf), both large.

I had hoped to avoid the need for ghostscript to print the output of 
Abiword (rtf or html) or Opera (html)  But the scripts I found to convert 
html to pdf require perl or PHP, which are larger than gs (only 3MB, 
latest version compiled against glibc).

Abiword converts its files to postscript for printing with gs, and I think 
there is a way to use it in commandline mode to convert WORD files and 
plain text and RTF to postscript and or pdf (using gs ps2pdf).  Maybe also 
html to ps to pdf?

We have a 2003 version that Steven compiled and there is now a Nov 5 2006 
version 2.4.6-1.fc5.

HTMLdoc converts HTML to PDF directly.  GPL version free from 
http://www.htmldoc.org.  1.9.x Aug 7 2006, 1.8.27 Aug 2, 2006.  3.2MB 
tar.bz2 latest version.  Ron, are you interested?

Abiword can produce html, rtf, or xml (for which there are some 
convertors, mostly commercial).

UnRTF is a command-line program written in C which converts rtf to text, 
html, or ps.  Latest version 401K tar.gz.  gs needed to convert ps to pdf 
to print Abiword output with netpbm.  I will try to minimize gs instead.

More after I try printing with Abiword and gs in BL2 then BL3. 
And converting with Abiword CLI.

Sindi