Convert text to fit the page (from commandline)

conversionpdfprintingtext formatting

How to scale short texts (from one word, up to couple of short lines) to fit the page (nice to have choice if centred or aligned to left etc) ?
(from commandline)

Command:

echo Audio | lpr -P Dymo450LabelWriter_network -o raw -o scaling=100

Produces (wrong!!!) just small text in corner (I would like it to be scaled to page):

Please note that I use custom page formats (in above case it's 57mm x 32 mm).

Do you have something using pretty standard packages (simpler than generating LaTeX) ?

(Environment: printer works well with png, pdf, ps)

Best Answer

ImageMagick can do it. See the examples under “Text Handling — Best Fit to Image”.

convert -background white -fill black -density 600x600 -size 1346x756 -gravity center label:'Audio' audio.pdf

It also supports multiline:

convert -background white -fill black -density 600x600 -size 1346x756 -gravity center label:'Audio\nCables' audio_cables.pdf

Output of first command:

Output of second command:

Related Solutions

Xpdf fit to page width in fullscreen mode

Sure enough. This appears to be a bug in xpdf.

You can switch to "width" view easily by tapping w as soon as xpdf opens, but there does not seem to be a way to make it behave from the command line. The only thing I could think of would be to hack it using expect or some sort of keyboard event routing to the X window to send it that keystroke when it starts up.

Use convert to grab a specific page from a PDF file

ImageMagick is a tool for bitmap images, which most PDFs aren't. If you use it, it will rasterize the data, which is often not desirable.

Pdftk can extract one or more pages from a PDF file.

pdftk A=input.pdf cat A42 A43 output pages_42_43.pdf

If you have a LaTeX installation with PDFLaTeX, you can use pdfpages. There's a shell wrapper for pdfpages, pdfjam.

pdfjam -o pages_42_43.pdf input.pdf 42,43

Another possibility (overkill here, but useful for requirements more complex that one page) is Python with the PyPdf library.

#!/usr/bin/env python
import copy, sys
from pyPdf import PdfFileWriter, PdfFileReader
input = PdfFileReader(sys.stdin)
output = PdfFileWriter()
for i in [42, 43]:
    output.addPage(input.getPage(i))
output.write(sys.stdout)

Best Answer

Related Solutions

Xpdf fit to page width in fullscreen mode

Use convert to grab a specific page from a PDF file

Related Question