🚀 go-pugleaf

Stefano Pagiola writes
| gerben@rna.indiv.nluug.nl writes
| > I have a large ASCII document that I want to print. To
| > prevent using hundreds of pages I want to use two pages
| > (on A5 format) on every A4 page I print. I have Edit (of
| > course), Writenow and Wordperfect. Do people have a good trick
| > of achieving this?
| 
| In Edit and WriteNow, go to the format->Page Layout panel and choose  
| 2-up from the pop-up list.

The 2-up output from Edit in 3.0 ends up in Landscape mode.  Unless, of course,  
you actually *choose* Landscape in the Page Layout panel - in which case your  
document shows up in Portrait mode with two centered, half-size pages: one on  
top of the next (go figure).  No good if you wanted Portrait output.

WriteNow, Release 2.0 (v37), does not actually have variable line-spacing.  All  
lines have the same height, even if you change from 12-point all the way down  
to 6-point or 2-point.  So if you want to print a 2-up document in a half-size  
font to preserve the expected aspect ratio of paragraphs, you end up with a lot  
of white space.

Rather than just complain, though, I can offer a possible solution - the  
following command-line will eat an ASCII file and print out a 2-up document in  
Portrait mode using a pleasantly spaced (width AND height) font:

enscript -2 -fCourier6 ascii.txt

The price is right, too.  It comes free with your NeXT.  Look up 'enscript' in  
Librarian for more options which might better suit your needs.  My guess is  
that Edit uses "enscript -2r" for 2-up instead of my preferred options.

| It would be great if Preview let you do it (in fact, its ludicrous  
| that it doesn't); then from any app you'd just print to .ps and use  
| preview to print it.

I think reading in and reformatting a PostScript document may be too  
complicated unless all software on the NeXT outputs Adobe Document Conforming  
PostScript to help with the interpretation of the input.

There are utilities on various archives to do this with PostScript files, but I  
think that they require Conforming PostScript on input.
-- 
Brian Willoughby	Software Design Engineer, BSEE NCSU
BrianW@SoundS.WA.com	Sound Consulting and Signal Processing Software
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