How to Print an ASCII File 80 Characters Wide

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I have a file that is 80 characters wide. I am using OS X. The problem that I have is when I open the file and try to print it in TextEdit, the lines wrap before the 80 character mark. I'd like the file presented in the same way printed as it is in the file. So, my question is this;

How do I print an 80 character wide ASCII file (and preferably specifying margins) such at the font will be fixed-width and sized appropriately to fill the entire page while still retaining the position of original line breaks and not additional wrapping. If the resultant file is a PDF or other format convertible to PDF that would be fine. If anybody could answer this question I would really appreciate it.

Best Answer

In Textedit, make the file plaintext by going to the Format menu, and selecting the Make Plain Text command. This will use a fixed-width font and remove any other characters.

Next, Select Page Setup... from the File menu, then select Paper Size: and go to Manage Custom Sizes.

Create a Paper Size of 8.5 wide x 11 high, set the top, bottom, left & right margins to zero, then save the custom size by clicking the "+" button.

Go to the File menu > Export as PDF.

On the Export as PDF click on show details and uncheck the box that says Rewrap contents to fit page

Just tested this and it works for me!

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For a free and universal alternative you can use the pdfbook script, part of the pdfjam collection which is usually included in LaTeX distributions (notably MacTeX). It's simple to use from the command line:

pdfbook mypdf.pdf

If the above doesn't work, then /Library/TeX/texbin isn't in your PATH (or /usr/texbin for older versions of MacTeX). The best course of action is to ensure PATH is correctly set (lots of command line programs will fail if the PATH variable isn't correct and pdfbook is one of them); this isn't trivial under OS X if you want a consistent behavior between applications launched from the dock and applications run from a terminal so you definitely should search a complete solution to this specific problem. As dirty work-around, you can run export PATH="$PATH:/Library/TeX/texbin:/usr/texbin" every time before you use pdfbook (including in the service below).

If you don't want to use the command line, you can create a service easily.

Launch Automator (on Yosemite it's in Applications/Others)
Create a new document and select "Service".
On top of the right frame, for "Service receives selected" choose "PDF files".
Search "Run Shell Script" from the bar on the top of the left frame and double-click it. Select to "Pass input" as "arguments" in the newly created window.
Enter a simple script running pdfbook, for instance pdfbook "$@".
Save it as "Create booklet" (for instance).
In Finder, select a PDF file, then in the menu go to Services/Create booklet.

My complete script also creates a temporary file and opens the resulting PDF:

TMPF=`mktemp -t bookletXXXX`
mv "$TMPF" "$TMPF.pdf"
pdfbook -o "$TMPF.pdf" "$@"
open "$TMPF.pdf"

The most obvious problem is the several GB download and installation of a LaTeX distribution if all you want is the pdfbook script.

How to print or export annotations in a pdf file

This is probably too late but I think I know the answer, so maybe it'll help someone. What you probably want to do is

Convert notes to skim notes
Go to File > Export > choose File format either Notes as RTF or Notes as text.

This answers your 'export to text document' questions. I don't see how you could print the PDF together with the text in the anchored notes, though.

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