How to convert TXT to PDF?

Question

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.

UPDATE: 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.

Answer 1

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.

Answer 2

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.

Answer 3

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

Answer 4

There is also a UTF-8 to PostScript converter called paps.

Answer 5

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