u2ps

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About

u2ps is text to postscript converter similar to a2ps,
with emphasis on Unicode support.

Key features:

* utf8 support implemented (mostly) in PostScript
* clean, readable and reasonably small output files
* font subset embedding for Type 1 and Type 42 (TTF) fonts
* ANSI control sequences support (color and font variants)

Things missing at present:

- proper combining mark positioning
- reordering and ligatures
- bidi support

The tool should be usable on any reasonably sane system with
Ghostscript installed.

As long as the input does not stray too far from common left-to-right
scripts and usable fonts are available, u2ps should work well.

Current version is probably the last one using mostly-postscript
mostly-font-agnostic approach; check TODO for further development ideas.


Installation

Common C library, make and cc are needed to build u2ps. Font reduction needs ghostscript at runtime.

./configure --prefix=...
make
make install

Unless told otherwise, u2ps defaults to FreeMono font. Make sure to have it installed.

For hacking/debugging, run "./configure devel" instead, the resulting executable will work right from the source directory.

Documentation

See man page and text files in doc/ directory.


Sample usage
~~~~~~~~~~~~
The files in text/ directory may be used as a showcase for u2ps features.
Assuming u2ps is built in devel mode (./configure devel), run

    ./u2ps text/ansi.txt
    ./u2ps text/alph.txt
    ./u2ps text/utf8.txt
    ./u2ps -2 -f FreeMono -f Kochi -f Tlwg text/alph.txt
    ./u2ps -2 -f FreeMono -f Kochi -f Tlwg text/utf8.txt

The last two commands assume Kochi-Mincho (http://en.osdn.jp/projects/efont/)
and Tlwg (http://linux.thai.net/projects/fonts-tlwg) fonts are installed
in the system and Ghostscript knows where to find them.

Sample usage with individual font setting:

    ./u2ps -2 -f FreeMono -fC:SawarabiGothic-Medium text/alph.txt

This works for fonts not known to u2ps.


Github note
~~~~~~~~~~~
This is a modernized version of my old project from Berlios,
now rewritten in C, with lots of incompatible changes.

Check perl branch for the original code if you need it.


License
~~~~~~~
GPL v3, see LICENSE file


Credits
~~~~~~~
Written by Alex Suykov <[email protected]>
with patches from Pierre Dehaen <[email protected]>
and Ionel Mugurel Ciobîcă <[email protected]>