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  • From: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • To: baslinux AT lists.ibiblio.org
  • Subject: Re: [BL] text to ps
  • Date: Tue, 1 May 2007 14:29:47 +0000 (UTC)

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




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