txt2ps - a simple row text to Structured PostScript convertor.
===============================================================

txt2ps is not the universal tool and not satisfy various for
converting text to PS. It were created with hope to print cyrillic
text in postscript printers without any external font.  Program have
tow internal bit-map fonts that are derived from 8x16 VGA compatible
fonts. This fonts may be used by converter to produce and download PS
type 3 font to the output document. There are several advantages of
this fonts - they are permanent, fixed-width and have pseudo-graphic
symbols, but they are still ugly...

Txt2ps operate like filter use standard input for row text and output
for PS.  The default settings are: font PCnormal, point size 10, line
spacing 1 line, lines per page 70, text encoding "alternative".  You
may specify any valid for you PS printer font on the command line: "-f
CustomFontName" or any other point size "-s 12" and event line spacing
and lines/page but this values are influence one to another.

If your text have ^L character (form feed), it will break current page
and start new. If you wish to print cyrillic text be worry about
encoding, the default is so called "alternative" that is used on PC's
in Russia but in Unix the "KOI" is used.

Also you may design your own bitmap fonts and include it in document
by -Fd command. The font should be 4096 bytes long, 16 bytes for each
character as far as you don't change the convertor sources.  The
output from txt2ps program is Structured PostScript hence if you have
some PS view program like Pageview from SUN (tm) or GhostView from
GNU(tm) you can see document by page to page.

I test and assemle this program in MS-DOS by TC 2.0 and BC 3.1, in
SunOS 4.1.1 by cc. Print and view output by Ghostscript and PageView.



some examples:
purpose: print cyrillic text, 10 point size:
txt2ps < file_name > output.ps

purpose: print cyrillic text, 12 point size:
txt2ps -s 12 < file_name > output.ps

purpose: print text in Courier font, 10 point size:
txt2ps -f Courier < file_name > output.ps

purpose: print text in custom bitmap font, located in 8x16custom.fnt
txt2ps -Fd 8x16custom.fnt -f Custom < file_name > output.ps

I'll be very thankful if you tell me about any bugs in program.  The
first is that it dont't translate TAB to SPACEs.  It will be fixed in
future.  Yuri Merezhuk. <zuk@elvis.msk.su> <zuk@elvis.sovusa.com>


==================================================
Dec. 30, 1994. Vadim Maslov, vadik@cs.umd.edu:
I fixed the program and made it work under MSDOS and OS/2.

txt2ps -ek ...
prints KOI-8 encoded text. 
That is, the text is internally translated to ALT encoding.

Also I have a user complaint:

Date: Mon, 27 Mar 1995 15:51:11 -0500 (EST)
From: Lev Gorenstein <lev@chem.purdue.edu>
To: Yuri Merezhuk <zuk@elvis.msk.su>, Vadim Maslov <vadik@cs.umd.edu>

	txt2ps -ek <ass >ass.ps

The program confused letter (Russian) "e" and "jo" and put dots on every 
"e".  And those dots were sometimes displaced a little, and even with a 
little "e" they were at the position as if it was capital "E" (quite 
high).  Overall appearance of the document was therefore quite poor, kind 
of, you know, not good dirty xerox...  

This was not a printer bug - xpsview showed the document exactly the same 
as it was printed.  When used -f PCbold, the text was ok, no dots, etc.  
So I finally printed in bold... 

--

My opinion: use bold font.
If somebody wants to fix normal font, please send 
fixed version to me.

Vadim Maslov
