MacOS – How to generate a (valid) PDF with “a2ps foo.txt”

homebrewmacospdfterminal

I installed a2ps on Mac OS X 10.10.4 via brew. My ~/.a2psrc contains Options: --medium=Letter -P pdf. But when I do a2ps foo.txt no PDF file is generated (this used to work on Ubuntu/Debian Linux). When I do a2ps -o foo.pdf foo.txt I get a PDF, but it cannot be opened (maybe it is corrupted?). However, on a2ps -o foo.pdf foo.txt I get a PS which I can then convert to PDF (and open). How can I make a2ps foo.txt to produce a valid PDF on Mac OS X? Note that I'm looking specifically for the command line a2ps, no GUI or other programs (obviously it's easy to generate a PDF from a text file with other tools)

Best Answer

The a2ps utility is for formatting files for printing on a PostScript printer, hence its name is not a2pdf.

The file you created under Linux (or OS X), which is a miss-named .pdf file, is in fact a PostScript file and many Linux Distros will open it anyway. Thus leading you to believe is was a PDF Document when in reality it's not.

Looking at the file created under Linux in a Hex Editor its header starts off with, e.g., %!PS-Adobe-3.0 and a PDF Document starts with, e.g., %PDF-1.6%.

This is why you get the "The file “filename.pdf” could not be opened. It may be damaged or use a file format that Preview doesn’t recognize." error message under OS X when trying to open a PostScript Document with a miss-named PDF Document extension.

Update: Installing a2pdf

After doing a little research I found a2pdf. Further research required having Font::TTF::Font and PDF::API2 also installed. So I downloaded all three packages master.zip (for a2pdf), Font-TTF-1.04.tar.gz and PDF-API2-2.023.tar.gz.

Next I extracted all three and installed them in the same manner in the following order, Font::TTF::Font, PDF::API2 then the master.zip (for a2pdf). I did this in a Terminal using the following commands.

$ cd $target_directory
$ perl Makefile.PL
$ make
$ sudo make install

I then tested, from my Home Directory, with: a2pdf filename.txt > filename.pdf

It create filename.pdf and I then opened it in Preview just fine as a PDF Document.

That said, there are other modules that can be installed to do things like syntax highlighting, e.g. Perl::Tidy. So you'll need to do a bit more research to utilize the full capabilities of a2pdf.

Note: I have Xcode and Command Line Tools for Xcode installed and as long as you have Command Line Tools for Xcode installed, which is a Homebrew prerequisite, you can install all of this from the Terminal the old fashioned way if not available from Homebrew, which I do not believe it is.

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