[tlug] the paps program

[Scott Robbins <scottro@example.com>]

Howdy folks,

I had briefly mentioned the paps program in a previous post, where I'd
mentioned printing using openoffice.  (Sigh, I still don't see how I
missed Mauro's post about that.)

At any rate, I've run into another program, paps, which can be found at

http://paps.sourceforge.net/

It's handy for mutt (or sylpheed) users who want to print.  It requires
pango and doxygen--the need for doxygen seems to be for html files,
files that are more useful to programmers than end users, but I don't
know enough about coding to hack it.

As (Columbus) Jim pointed out, mozilla and others will also convert
Japanese textfiles to postscript.  However, the nice thing about paps is
that it can be used from mutt for example by simply hitting |paps |lp. 

For me, at least, it was almost a missing link, in that one of the few
things that I had problems with in Japanese and Linux (or the BSDs) was
printing text files or email (as I use mutt).  It's in the Debian and
Ubuntu repositories, and compiles on Free and NetBSD. 


So, just thought I'd give it a mention.  (Actually, going through the
archives, I see that Mauro mentioned it in passing in the same thread
where he told us about openoffice -p but he didn't give it a plug the
way I am.)  :)  

I should add that it only seems to work with UTF-8, so one might need to
use iconv as well, if they're using EUC or ISO-2022.  

These days, as more and more programs seem to be able to convert to
postscript on their own, it's probably becoming less important, save to
mutt users.  :)

-- 

Scott

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