CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pdfunicodeprintingutf-8ascii
guettli
guettli

Reputation: 27969

text to pdf with utf8 encoding (alternative to a2ps)

The programm a2ps does not support utf-8. At least my version does only support the latin-X encodings:

a2ps --list=encoding

Version:

GNU a2ps 4.14

How can I convert a simple utf-8 text to postscript or pdf?

Upvotes: 19

Views: 16369

Answers (7)

jimifiki
jimifiki

Reputation: 5544

Use paps! For instance I use it as follow:

paps --font="Monospace 10" input.txt > output.ps

and I have no problem with utf encoding. If you need a pdf file then

pdf2ps output.ps

Upvotes: 5

H. Rittich
H. Rittich

Reputation: 845

You can use Vim. Open the file and execute the command :hardcopy > output.ps in normal mode. You can also do this directly from the shell. Executing

$ vim -c ":hardcopy > output.ps" -c ":quit" input.txt

in your shell will open Vim, generate the output.ps, and then close Vim.

Upvotes: 5

user12306383
user12306383

Reputation: 21

https://gitlab.com/gnomify/u2ps is the replacement of gnome-u2ps.

Upvotes: 2

Norman Ramsey
Norman Ramsey

Reputation: 202615

I've gotten acceptable results (for printing code listings) from https://github.com/arsv/u2ps

Upvotes: 2

Joce
Joce

Reputation: 2342

There's a utility based on gnome libraries and named gnome-u2ps. It has less functionality than a2ps, and it seems that it is not maintained anymore.

Upvotes: 0

Thomas Baruchel
Thomas Baruchel

Reputation: 7517

If what you actually want is to use a2ps or enscript (which is a similar tool), and if your single need is to use them with some UTF-8 document, you only have to convert your document to ISO-8859-1 or some supported encoding. Various tools allow this. For instance, here is a workflow for enscript (but you can surely do the same with a2ps):

cat document.txt | iconv -c -f utf-8 -t ISO-8859-1 | enscript -o document.ps

But you may lose some characters during the conversion because such encodings have a smaller range than UTF-8.

On the other hand, if UTF-8 is a requirement, you may rather have to look for some recent tool allowing to convert UTF-8 to PDF. I wrote myself a Python program called txt2pdf; you may find it here. Have also a look at tools like pandoc, gimli, rst2pdf or wkhtmltopdf.

Upvotes: 13

user1026669
user1026669

Reputation: 243

If the text file is small, paps converts to text to ps, which then can be fed to ps2pdf. The problem is ps file from paps causes ps2pdf to create a very big pdf file. If that is ok, this is possible. Currently, I am having a large file size pdf from paps.

Upvotes: 1

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