🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1252@corpane.UUCP>, drl@corpane (Dan Lance) writes:
>I am looking for a public domain program to convert ASCII text to PostScript,
Allow me to hype cz a little, though it is free software, not
public domain.


      DESCRIPTION

The cz system converts text files in any "context-free
octet-based" character set into PostScript.  By octet-based, I
mean that each character in the character set is represented by
a sequence of one or more 8-bit bytes.  By "context-free" I mean
that only the octets of a character determine what the character
is, not any other octets in the file.  This excludes character
sets that use locking shift sequences, for example (complete)
ISO 2022.

Currently, cz can handle the ISO 8859/1 character set, also
known as Latin-1.  This is a superset of ASCII, with characters
for all major Western European languages.  cz can also handle
several national versions of ISO 646, including ASCII and
"SWASCII," the Swedish national versions.  SWASCII is the
character set that uses vertical bar (|) for o with umlaut,
etc.  cz can also handle most of CCITT T.61, the teletext
character set also used for X.400 mail.  T.61 is (almost) a
subset of ISO 6937/2.

cz is completely table-driven, and it is easy to get cz to emit
the PostScript for other character sets.  The hard part is
figuring out what PostScript cz should emit.

An optional heuristic attempts to guess when certain ISO 646 bit
codes represent ASCII (e.g. right curly brace) and when they
represent SWASCII (e.g. a with ring.)  The measured error rate
of this heuristic is less than 3% on real swnet (Swedish news
group hierarchy) news articles.  There is also a heuristic for
Danish, and tools and documentation for writing heuristics for
other languages.  These heuristics can be used for other
purposes than printing text files, e.g. in mail and news
readers.

cz is very flexible.  It can use any font available on the
output device.  You have complete control over font sizes, paper
size, page layout, number of columns, line numbers, portrait or
landscape mode, page reversal, leading (line spacing), tab
expansion, and x- or y-axis adjustments to handle misaligned
printers.  cz handles the same typographic units as TeX, e.g.
millimeters, inches, points, etc.

For GNU Emacs users, there are functions cz-buffer and cz-region
analogous to lpr-buffer and lpr-region.  These print ISO 8859/1
by default, but the character set can be changed by changing the
elisp variable cz-CommandFile.  The elisp variables
cz-FixedWidth and cz-AutoLandscape can be set to control the
body font and format, and the variable cz-output can be modified
to output to a different printer.

If you read mail with the RMAIL mode of GNU Emacs, you can print
a copy of any message with the function rmail-cz.  This is by
default bound to the "L" (Laser) key.

If you read mail with Sun's mailtool, you can set the printmail
variable in your .mailrc file to the command cz-news.  This will
print the current message when you click the print button.

If you read news with the Gnews mode of GNU Emacs, you can print
a copy of any article with the function Gnews-cz.  This is by
default bound to the "L" (Laser) key.

If you read news with rn or rrn, you can define macros in your
.rnmac file to call the command cz-news.

The cz system has three mechanisms for handling long lines.
AutoColumn can be used to reduce the number of page columns if a
line exceeds a certain length.  For example, you can specify
two-column mode by default, but switch automatically to
single-column mode in case a long line is encountered.

AutoLandscape can be used to switch automatically from portrait
mode to landscape mode if a long line is encountered.

Both AutoColumn and AutoLandscape can operate on either a
page-by-page or a whole file basis.  For example, AutoLandscape
in the page-by-page mode prints pages containing long lines in
landscape mode, and other pages in portrait mode.

Long lines can also be folded, i.e. broken across several output
lines.  The line breaks are marked by a special symbol, and the
continuation lines are indented.

Paper margins can be specified separately for landscape and
portrait mode.  For example, it is easy to have a 10 mm top
margin in portrait mode and a 20 mm top margin in landscape
mode.

An option places a control-D at the end of the PostScript
output, for printers that need one.

Landscape rotation can be either positive or negative, i.e.
with paper with holes, you can have the holes at the top or the
bottom of the page.

The line number of the last line in a file is always printed, if
line number printing is enabled.  This makes it easy to see how
many lines are in a file.  Turning off line number printing does
not change the left margin.


      WHAT TO GET FROM THE ARCHIVE

cz        comp.sources.misc volume 8 issues 65-75, 77-78 ( 1 Oct 1989)
                                     issue  97           (28 Oct 1989)
libhoward comp.sources.misc volume 8 issues 80-87        ( 1 Oct 1989)
                                     issue  96           (28 Oct 1989)
--
Howard Gayle
TN/ETX/TT/HL
Ericsson Telecom AB
S-126 25 Stockholm
Sweden
howard@ericsson.se
uunet!ericsson.se!howard
Phone: +46 8 719 5565
FAX  : +46 8 719 8439