I just found this cool utility for printing text files. It's called
a2ps. It converts text files into postscript. Here's a great use I found
for it. Whenever I want to look at a printout of a man page, it has all
these ^H and underscores. Then other times it has the letters repeated.
Anyway, it looks a mess. For instance, say I want the entire perl DBI
manpage printed out. I used to do this.
$ perldoc DBI > DBI.txt
and then
$ lpr DBI.txt
Not only did I lose the formatting, but the fonts were big too. It
seemed like reems of paper were pumping out of my printer, because I
like to look at a printout rather than the screen when researching.
With the a2ps utility, I issue the command
$ a2ps -2 --indent=30 DBI.txt
and voila, I have a print out with 2 ups per page, bolded, and
underlined text along with a date header, page numbers, the file name,
and a nice looking border. I saved half my paper, plus I got a great
looking printout. Anyway, if you are looking to check it out, it's
available at sunsite. you can get it off of a mirror at
ftp://ftp.cdrom.com/pub/linux/sunsite/apps/wp/
too.
Here are the files you are interested in
a2ps-4.8.4.tar.gz
a2ps.lsm
Unpack the source, and do your standard ./configure, make, su, make install
and you are rocking and rolling with a2ps. There's a Debian package for
it too.
brian
-- Brian Lavender http://www.brie.com/brian/
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