How to print a2ps a file –portrait without being all squished

a2psprinting

I installed a2ps for printing but the output is landscaped.

I tried using –portrait which 'kinda' worked… but didn't. The orientation was switched 90' but it's only 50% of the width and the text is tiny.

Best Answer

Short answer

Use -1 instead of --portrait.

Slightly longer answer

By default a2ps tries to put 2 pages on each sheet, this works best side-by-side and landscape, even if you rotate the page a2ps still tries to insert 2 pages. The answer is to give a2ps the -1 switch which instructs it to only have 1 page per sheet (3-9 are also valid number of pages).

Related Solutions

Printing Latex source with a2ps

The message (in English "egrep: Invalid range end") comes from a bug in a2ps.

Its /usr/bin/texi2dvi4a2ps shell script calls egrep wrongly:

Instead of

echo "$command_line_filename" | egrep '^(/|[A-z]:/)' >/dev/null \
|| command_line_filename="./$command_line_filename"

it should be

echo "$command_line_filename" | egrep '^(/|[A-Za-z]:/)' >/dev/null \
|| command_line_filename="./$command_line_filename"

As the bug is in a shell script, you can fix it easily by just editing the file.

The pattern checks if the filename is absolute (starts with an /, relevant on Unix-like systems) or starts with a drive name (e.g. C:, relevant only for Windows systems). Otherwise, the filename is prepended with ./.

Feel free to report this bug upstream or to the distribution you use.

Formatting file in command line for printing

Use fold. Extracts from the man page:

Wrap  input  lines in each FILE (standard input by default), writing to
standard output.

-b, --bytes
   count bytes rather than columns

-c, --characters
   count characters rather than columns

-s, --spaces
    break at spaces

-w, --width=WIDTH
    use WIDTH columns instead of 80

Use fold (maybe using the -s option so that it doesn't break your lines mid-word) to set your document to about 80 characters wide and print:

fold -s myfile.txt | lpr

Or, to save the formatted version:

fold -s myfile.txt > output.txt