Hi Chris, I agree that this stuff is easy to do in Terminal, but a lot of people don't feel comfortable with Terminal and the command line. Besides, this still doesn't address getting this printed out, so you'd have to add the pipe to a selected printer.
It's actually not hard to do what they want within TextEdit, where you can set the default window size in characters and lines for plain text in preferences, then print according to the window layout instead of the page margins, as I outlined in a separate post. Cheers, Esther On Feb 27, 2012, at 6:04 AM, Chris Blouch wrote: > This is a perfect example of the kind of stuff you can do in the unix shell > of terminal. Save a text file somewhere handy like your desktop. I called > mine test.txt. Then open terminal and cd to wherever you have the file. So > for me I did > > cd ~/Desktop > > then use the fold command which breaks text files into fixed length lines > like this: > > fold -w30 -s test.txt > > The -s parameter says to break lines on spaces. If you don't mind it breaking > in the middle of a word you can leave that out. If you someday splurge on a > 40 cell display just change the 30 to a 40. That at least gets you partway > there. The shell has the idea of a pipe written as "|" where the output of > one command becomes the input to the next. So we can pipe the output from > fold to the input of the "pr" command which lets us insert page breaks like > this: > > fold -w30 -s test.txt | pr -tF -l27 > > the pr command normally adds headers and such to each page which we suppress > with the -t option. The F option says to output real pagrebreaks rather than > a bunch of extra newlines. The L parameter, as you can guess, is how many > lines before a pagebreak. > > To learn more about the fold or pr commands just type "man" followed by the > command to get more details from the manual pages. man man tells you about > the manual itself. Of course you probably want to write all this good stuff > back out to a file. To do that we want to redirect the output to a file > instead of the terminal. To do that we add a redirect using the ">" and then > a filename to the end of the recipe like this: > > fold -w30 -s test.txt | pr -tF -l27 > fixed.txt > > and you should find a fixed.txt file on your desktop all nicely formatted. > Welcome to the dark underbelly of OSX where great power and capability lie, > if you can just find the right man page :) > > CB > > On 2/27/12 6:47 AM, John Sanfilippo wrote: >> Oo, I have much the same concern, so I'm looking forward to hearing more >> about this. >> >> js >> >> >> On Feb 27, 2012, at 9:42 AM, Paul Erkens wrote: >> >> Dear listers, >> >> I have an old braille printer that is not attached to my mac. To emboss >> something, all I have to do is create simple plain text files with 27 lines >> per page, and no more than 30 characters per line. Looking at how text edit >> handles printing however, that works with inches or centimeters, and in >> general, with a bitmap, the size of the paper you choose to print on. >> Characters, lines and the whole page can be scaled. >> >> However, what I need for my braille printer is to ignore scaling, and tell >> text edit to wrap to the next line after 30 characters max, and a page break >> after 27 lines, no matter which font size etc I choose, because fonts etc >> are not important in braille. >> >> Once a text document has been loaded in text edit, how do I reformat it, so >> that it writes a carriage return line feed pair at the end of each line of >> 30 characters most, and a page break, control l, at the end of 27 lines? >> Very interested. I'm now doing it all by hand, but since I received 8 songs >> from my choir all at once, I'm hoping to learn an easier way to reformat >> typed text into something my braille printer can handle. That braille >> printer is on windows, but I'd rather do all the preparations in text edit, >> than on a windows machine. Is it possible to make text edit do what I need >> here? >> >> Paul. >> -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to [email protected]. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [email protected]. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
