a2ps-multibyte.el

This package allows printing Emacs buffers using a2ps, even when they use an UTF-8 charset or another multibyte character coding system (such encodings are otherwise not supported by a2ps).

This only works if the buffer contents could have been encoded using a supported 8-bit coding system (e.g. a French text stored as UTF-8, but featuring only ISO-8859-15 characters).

Installation

(add-to-list 'load-path "/path/to/a2ps-multibyte-package")
(require 'a2ps-multibyte)

You can optionally bind the a2ps commands to keys:

(global-set-key (kbd "<print>")   'a2ps-buffer)
(global-set-key (kbd "S-<print>") 'a2ps-region)

Basic usage

a2ps-multibyte reimplements the same commands as the Emacs' standard a2ps package. You can thus use the usual interface:

M-x a2ps-buffer
M-x a2ps-region

Giving these commands a prefix argument allows specifying additional switches to be used in the a2ps command line.

If all characters in the buffer/region cannot be coded using the coding system specified by a2ps-encoding, you will be proposed to provide another.

Customization

This package can be customized via Emacs' standard interface: M-x customize-group a2ps

Here are the relevant variables:

a2ps-command: path to the a2ps utility.
a2ps-switches: list of additional command-line switches, e.g.
```
(setq a2ps-switches '("-l" "100"))
```
a2ps-encoding: 8-bit encoding to try by default when printing files. If you mostly work with documents in a language supported by an 8-bit encoding, this is the one you should specify here. E.g.
```
(setq a2ps-encoding 'iso-8859-15-unix) ;; Latin-1 charset
```
Try running M-x list-coding-systems to see the full list of supported encodings.
a2ps-filter-functions: list of functions to run before printing the buffer. These functions should be callable without argument, and should modify the contents of the current buffer. They will be called in the context of a temporary buffer, so that the original buffer is left untouched.

Contributing

If you make improvements to this code or have suggestions, please do not hesitate to fork the repository or submit bug reports on github. The repository's URL is:

https://github.com/ffevotte/a2ps-multibyte.el.git

License

Large parts of this code come from a2ps-print.el in the a2ps package and are (C) Bruce Ingalls.

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

ffevotte / a2ps-multibyte.el