There is a powerful perl program which converts text to pdf directly, called "txt2pdf".
This is a shareware. I forget the URL, but the link is available at freshmeat.net. As far as I recall it was from Sanface Software. I tried it a few months ago ... pretty good. USM Bish On Fri, Jun 08, 2001 at 10:05:23AM -0700, Robert L. Yelvington wrote: > thanks for the suggestion, HH! i believe that the perl option is better > for me, text process the ascii doc via perl... > > sincerely, > ~robt > > Harry Henry Gebel wrote: > > > > On Thu, Jun 07, 2001 at 06:39:22PM -0700, Robert L. Yelvington wrote: > > > can anyone suggest a good package to format ascii docs to be converted > > > to pdf? > > > > > what i am looking for is something that can outline blocks of text with > > > boxes, selectively shade lines or single words as wells bold, italicize, > > > underline text, etc. > > > > > i have looked into enscript...but can't figure out how to make it do > > > what I want it to do(YET!!!!)... > > > > > the formatting has got to be done on the fly, from cron for instance and > > > I guess I could use standard > > > PCL or PS and write it myself, but am hoping that there's a simpler (and > > > less time consuming) way to do this... > > > > If you adopted formatting guidelines for the ascii text (for example, one > > blank line is a paragraph, two is a section, three is a chapter, text after > > an underscore is underlined, etc.) it wouldn't be too hard to write a > > script in Python or Perl to convert it to docbook; the docbook could then > > be converted to pdf using any of several tools; alternatively there is a > > Python library that can generate PDF files directly, so you could write a > > Python script to generate the PDF directly from the ascii text. > > > > -- > > Harry Henry Gebel > > West Dover Hundred, Delaware > > GPG encrypted email gladly accepted. Key ID: B853FFFE > > Fingerprint: 15A6 F58D AEED 5680 B41A 61FE 5A5F BB51 B853 FFFE > > > > ------------------------------------------------------------------------ > > Part 1.2Type: application/pgp-signature
