dotprint is a tool that can be used to convert text files that include escape sequences for dot matrix printers into PDF files.
Nowadays you are not likely to come across such files often but they were common in the "bad old days" of DOS. Programs would often assume an "epson-compatible" dot matrix printer and would embed the escape sequences (for e.g. condensed or expanded font) into the output.
If you want to use such files now, converting them into PDF is quite useful. You can send them to others and you can print them out on other printers than just dot matrix printers. But please note that only a few escape sequences are supported. :-(
So this might be useful to you if you are still running some DOS applications, perhaps in dosemu. With some scripting you can make the old DOS applications produce PDFs.
In difference to previous versions: dotprint does not expect the input to be in UTF-8 encoding, which is something a DOS application would most likely not produce. So no conversion of the input file is necessary. You can define your encoding by a commandline switch. Assuming your Input file is in CP850 you can specify the encoding with a translation table:
dotprint -t tables/cp850.trans --output myfile.pdf myfile.PRN
Those translation files are delivered with dotprint in the tables folder. TODO: Specifiy an installation directory for the translation tables and reference this folder here.
First you need to install the required dependencies. These are:
- glibmm-2.4
- cairomm-10.
In Debian/Ubuntu you can get them via:
apt install libglibmm-2.4-dev libcairomm-1.0-dev
CMake is used for the build. It's possible to configure and build the program by:
cmake . && make
Prefix can be specified by adding -DCMAKE_INSTALL_PREFIX=prefix to the CMake invocation. Default is /usr/local.
Run the install make target:
make install
You can specify your own DESTDIR.
You need to specifiy:
- the input file (text input with potential escape sequences, in UTF-8 encoding)
- the output file (PDF)
You most likely want to specify the preprocessor. By default only newlines are interpreted which is arguably not too useful. So just add -P epson:
dotprint input-file.txt -o output-file.pdf -P epson
Run dotprint -h for a list of all the options.
GNU GPL 3 or newer.