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On Fri, 27 Apr 2007 Sindi wrote:

> Three text to ps convertors for use with ppa printers.
> Convert text to ps, then pstopnm -pbm (mono image) then pnmtoppa >
> /dev/lp0.
>
> These are two programs from the 90s:
>
> http://keesan.freeshell.org/bl/ascii2postscript-1.4.5.tgz
> (perl script)

This produces Adobe-1.0

> http://keesan.freeshell.org/bl/a2gs-5.0.glibc225.tgz

This does not tell you which version it produces.

> This next one is a very old and small version of what has grown to 2MB of
> source code and now converts from additional forms to ps.  It prints two
> pages per physical page (to file or paper).

1996

> http://keesan.freeshell.org/bl/a2ps-4.3.glibc225.tgz

This one produces Adobe-3.0 and the file is much larger.  I presume later 
Adobe postscript formats specify a lot more defaults.

Ghostscript will not work with the outputs from any of these.  I need to 
use gs-based pstopnm.

The maintainer of netpbm is helping me to create a pbm font for pbmtext 
(which is needed to convert text to pbm before using pnm2ppa to print to a 
ppa 'Windows' printer).  Abiword produced ps which does not have the same 
height for character and blank lines.  Opera produces something unusable 
if you tell it not to scale to fit page width, and if you scale, the font 
gets very messed up.  I was looking for another way to make text into ps 
which would let me create the font (pstopnm to create the font from a ps 
version of the text file it is based on).

The older a2ps is 28K.  Version 4.3.  Small source code.

The latest a2ps is 1.9MB source and needs 19MB disk space.  It imports a 
lot more formats.

Unfortunately the netpbm library was set up to use BDF fonts from X but X 
no longer uses them, it uses pcf.  I found a 1996 package of four BDF 
fonts in 14 and 16 point sizes, but I need 150 300 and 600 dpi fonts.



Sindi