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
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.
Answers:
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Method 1
pandoc can do this. It’s more focused on converting marked-up text to various formats, but it should have no problems with simple plaintext.
pandoc input.txt -o output.pdf
Method 2
You can print text to a PostScript file using Vim and then convert it to a PDF, as long as Vim was compiled with the +postscript feature.
For this you use the :hardcopy > {filename} command. For example you can open example.txt and execute
:hardcopy > example.ps
which will produce a file example.ps containing all the text in example.txt. The header of each page in the PostScript file will contain the original filename and the page number.
Then you can convert the PostScript file into a PDF by using the following command
ps2pdf example.ps
which will create example.pdf.
You can do the same directly from a terminal (without interacting with Vim) by using the following command
vim example.txt -c "hardcopy > example.ps | q"; ps2pdf example.ps
This opens example.txt in Vim and executes the command passed to the -c option, which in this case is a hardcopy command followed by a quit (q) command. Then it executes ps2pdf to produce the final file.
For more options see the help files with :help :hardcopy.
Method 3
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.
Method 4
LibreOffice / OpenOffice as well as most other word processors (Abiword) can do this quite easily.
There is a little utility called unoconv that uses the LibreOffice code base to do file format conversions on the command line. It can read and write any combination of formats that LibreOffice can and makes it very easy to do things like doc to pdf conversions on the command line. Simple txt to pdf would be easy for it.
Method 5
LibreOffice works for this. Usage:
libreoffice --convert-to "pdf" file.txt
The output will be called file.pdf.
Method 6
Just use the text2pdf , which is free and opensource.
At the link you can download the source or the pre-compiled binary for windows, solaris, dos.
I’m able to use it into AIX OS without problem.
Very simple to compile , just save the text2pdf.c and Makefile into the same directory and type make. (here I set the variable CC=gcc on AIX, on linux this will not be an issue)
$ ./text2pdf -h
text2pdf [options] [filename]
text2pdf makes a 7-bit clean PDF file (version 1.1) from any input file.
It reads from standard input or a named file, and writes the PDF file
to standard output.
There are various options as follows:
-h show this message
-f<font> use PostScript <font> (must be in standard 14, default: Courier)
-I use ISOLatin1Encoding
-s<size> use font at given pointsize (default 10)
-v<dist> use given line spacing (default 12 points)
-l<lines> lines per page (default 60, determined automatically
if unspecified)
-c<chars> maximum characters per line (default 80)
-t<spaces> spaces per tab character (default 8)
-F ignore formfeed characters (^L)
-A4 use A4 paper (default Letter)
-A3 use A3 paper (default Letter)
-x<width> independent paper width in points
-y<height> independent paper height in points
-2 format in 2 columns
-L landscape mode
Note that where one variable is implied by two options, the second option
takes precedence for that variable. (e.g. -A4 -y500)
In landscape mode, page width and height are simply swapped over before
formatting, no matter how or when they were defined.
text2pdf v1.1 (c) Phil Smith, 1996
$ ./text2pdf -f"Courier" -s6 -c216 -v6 -L -A4 ./rep3.txt >rep3.pdf
Method 7
There is also a UTF-8 to PostScript converter called paps.
Method 8
Use enscript to created a .ps file, and then ps2pdf (or ps2pdfwr) to convert to .pdf
The following script creates a .pdf file with 10 pt left and right margins, and uses a courier font that is 7.3 pts wide and 10 pts high, so a 132 col printout fits on an 8 1/2 X 11 page. Use enscript to setup your page, fonts, etc.
$ enscript -B --margins=10:10: -o outputfile.ps -f <a href="https://getridbug.com/cdn-cgi/l/email-protection" class="__cf_email__" data-cfemail="682b071d1a010d1a285f465b">[email protected]</a>/10 inputfile $ ps2pdfwr outputfile.ps newfile.pdf $ rm outputfile.ps
Method 9
Since it’s included by default in many distributions, a shorter way to call libreoffice from the cli:
soffice --convert-to pdf input.txt
Supported extensions by soffice, we can convert from/to:
ODF Spreadsheet .ods ODF Spreadsheet Template .ots Flat XML ODF Spreadsheet .fods Unified Office Format Spreadsheet .uos Microsoft Excel 2007-2013 XML .xlsx Microsoft Excel 2003 XML .xml Microsoft Excel 97-2003 .xls Microsoft Excel 97-2003 Template .xlt Data Interchange Format .dif dBase .dbf HTML Document (Calc) .html SYLK .slk Text CSV .csv Office Open XML Spreadsheet .xlsx Microsoft Excel 2007-2016 XML .xlsm
Method 10
I am adding this a2ps as another alternative. a2ps produces postscript file, then could be converted into pdf using ps2pdf. Both a2ps and ps2pdf should be in the major Linux distros repository.
a2ps input.txt -o output.ps ps2pdf output.ps output.pdf
All methods was sourced from stackoverflow.com or stackexchange.com, is licensed under cc by-sa 2.5, cc by-sa 3.0 and cc by-sa 4.0