Text Processing – How to Convert TXT to PDF

conversionimagemagickpdftext processing

I want to convert .txt files to .pdf. I'm using this:

ls | while read ONELINE; do convert -density 400 "$ONELINE" "$(echo "$ONELINE" | sed 's/.txt/.pdf/g')"; done

But this produces one "error" — if there's a very long line in the text file, it doesn't get wrapped.

Input text

Screenshot of the input file

Output PDF

Screenshot of the output PDF

—

Also, it would also be great if the output PDF could contain text, instead of images of text.

I have many-many-many TXT files. So don't want to do it by hand. I need an automatic solution, like the one I mentioned above.

Best Answer

One method is to use CUPS and the PDF psuedo-printer to "print" the text to a PDF file.

Another is to use enscript to encode to postscript and then convert from postscript to PDF using the ps2pdf file from ghostscript package.

Related Solutions

Good ways for annotating and searching in document (pdf, djvu)

I recommend PDF-Xchange Editor (installable in Linux through Wine). It functions both as a good viewer, allowing you to open multiple files in tabs. The UI is fantastic. And best of all, it stores annotations/comments within the file, unlike Okular. How to install?

In Ubuntu follow the instructions in: http://datainfer.wordpress.com/2013/03/24/use-pdf-xchange-viewer-in-64bit-ubuntu/

In Arch Linux:

yaourt -S pdf-xchange

and then to open pdf files with PDF-Xchange directly from the file manager use this script

PDFXEDITOR="/opt/pdf-xchange/PDFXEdit.exe" #Or equivalent path
INPUT="$(winepath -w "$1")"
wine "$PDFXEDITOR" "$INPUT"

Combine multiple PDF files into one (arranged in a matrix)

You could use the utility program pdfnup from the pdfjam suite.

pdfnup in.pdf --nup 3x3

should output the file in-nup.pdf with the pages of in.pdf arranged in a series of pages with a 3x3 matrix from the origin pdf.

You should merge all of you pdf files in an only one, also you must want to specify a paper size for the output file, see the pdfjam docs fot the details.