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Converting UTF-8 email text to PDF

From Loris Bennett@21:1/5 to All on Thu Feb 13 12:00:01 2025

Hi,

I am using Emacs' Gnus to display a buffer containing an email.
I want to convert this email to a PDF file.

If I save the mail to a file I get:

$ file einladung.txt
einladung.txt: news or mail, Unicode text, UTF-8 text

I have tried the following approaches to converting to PDF:

1. a2ps + ps2pdf

This fails because a2ps seemingly can't handle UTF-8.

2. pandoc

pandoc --wrap=none -o einladung.pdf einladung.txt

This works and preserves the non-ASCII characters, but the headers of
the email are compressed into a single paragraph, rather than being
preserved as individual lines.

Does anyone have a better suggestion?

Cheers,

Loris

PS I am aware that I can probably print the buffer directly from Emacs,
but that also seems fiddly to set up and I'll maybe ask about that in an
Emacs context.

--
This signature is currently under constuction.

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From Rand Pritelrohm@21:1/5 to Loris Bennett on Thu Feb 13 12:20:01 2025

On 2025-02-13 11:32:09, Loris Bennett wrote:

Hi,

[snip]

Does anyone have a better suggestion?

[snip]

Hello,

I use with success 'paps'
https://github.com/dov/paps

Maybe you can find it in repos.

Regards,
Rand

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From Hans@21:1/5 to All on Thu Feb 13 12:20:01 2025

Easiest way for me: Just print into a file. The result is a pdf-file.

However, do not know, if your printer driver can do this, but I suppose, most printer drivers are able to it.

Best

Hans

Am Donnerstag, 13. Februar 2025, 11:32:09 CET schrieb Loris Bennett:

Hi,

I am using Emacs' Gnus to display a buffer containing an email.
I want to convert this email to a PDF file.

If I save the mail to a file I get:

$ file einladung.txt
einladung.txt: news or mail, Unicode text, UTF-8 text

I have tried the following approaches to converting to PDF:

1. a2ps + ps2pdf

This fails because a2ps seemingly can't handle UTF-8.

2. pandoc

pandoc --wrap=none -o einladung.pdf einladung.txt

This works and preserves the non-ASCII characters, but the headers of
the email are compressed into a single paragraph, rather than being
preserved as individual lines.

Does anyone have a better suggestion?

Cheers,

Loris

PS I am aware that I can probably print the buffer directly from Emacs,
but that also seems fiddly to set up and I'll maybe ask about that in an Emacs context.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

From Loris Bennett@21:1/5 to Rand Pritelrohm on Thu Feb 13 13:20:01 2025

Rand Pritelrohm <[email protected]> writes:

On 2025-02-13 11:32:09, Loris Bennett wrote:

Hi,

[snip]

Does anyone have a better suggestion?

[snip]

Hello,

I use with success 'paps'
https://github.com/dov/paps

Maybe you can find it in repos.

'paps' is indeed available for bookworm, which is what I have.

However, I ended up installing the 'printing' package for Emacs, which
allowed me to print from Emacs to a PostScript file, which I could then
convert to PDF via 'ps2pdf'.

But thanks for the suggestion anyway.

--
This signature is currently under constuction.

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From Loris Bennett@21:1/5 to Hans on Thu Feb 13 13:20:01 2025

Hans <[email protected]> writes:

Easiest way for me: Just print into a file. The result is a pdf-file.

How do you do that from Emacs?

However, do not know, if your printer driver can do this, but I suppose, most printer drivers are able to it.

Best

Hans

Am Donnerstag, 13. Februar 2025, 11:32:09 CET schrieb Loris Bennett:

Hi,

I am using Emacs' Gnus to display a buffer containing an email.
I want to convert this email to a PDF file.

If I save the mail to a file I get:

$ file einladung.txt
einladung.txt: news or mail, Unicode text, UTF-8 text

I have tried the following approaches to converting to PDF:

1. a2ps + ps2pdf

This fails because a2ps seemingly can't handle UTF-8.

2. pandoc

pandoc --wrap=none -o einladung.pdf einladung.txt

This works and preserves the non-ASCII characters, but the headers of
the email are compressed into a single paragraph, rather than being
preserved as individual lines.

Does anyone have a better suggestion?

Cheers,

Loris

PS I am aware that I can probably print the buffer directly from Emacs,
but that also seems fiddly to set up and I'll maybe ask about that in an
Emacs context.

--
Dr. Loris Bennett (Herr/Mr)
FUB-IT, Freie Universität Berlin

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From Hans@21:1/5 to All on Thu Feb 13 16:40:01 2025

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

I got this information from here:

https://askubuntu.com/questions/27097/how-to-print-a-regular-file-to-pdf-from-command-line[1]

where are shown other ways, too.

Best

Hans

--------
[1] https://askubuntu.com/questions/27097/how-to-print-a-regular-file-to-pdf-from-command-line

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>I got this information from here:
 <a href="https://askubuntu.com/questions/27097/how-to-print-a-regular-file-to-pdf-from-command-line">https://askubuntu.com/questions/27097/how-to-print-a-regular-file-to-pdf-from-
command-line</a>
 where are shown other ways, too.
 Best
 Hans
</body>
</html>

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* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

From Hans@21:1/5 to you on Thu Feb 13 16:40:01 2025

This is a multi-part message in MIME format.

Hi Loris,
you wrote

$ file einladung.txt
einladung.txt: news or mail, Unicode text, UTF-8 text

So you already have a simple textfile. Did you try the following?

enscript einladung.txt -o - | ps2pdf - einladung.pdf

Please note, "enscript" is a package which can easily be installed witrh apt.

Hope this helps.

Best

Hans

<html>
<head>
<meta http-equiv="content-type" content="text/html; charset=UTF-8">
</head>
<body>Hi Loris,
you wrote
>   $ file einladung.txt
>   einladung.txt: news or mail, Unicode text, UTF-8 text
So you already have a simple textfile. Did you try the following?
 enscript einladung.txt -o - | ps2pdf - einladung.pdf
 Please note, "enscript" is a package which can easily be installed witrh apt.
 Hope this helps.
 Best
 Hans
</body>
</html>

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From Richmond@21:1/5 to Loris Bennett on Thu Feb 13 20:40:01 2025

On 13/02/2025 10:32, Loris Bennett wrote:

Hi,

I am using Emacs' Gnus to display a buffer containing an email.
I want to convert this email to a PDF file.

You can print the file into a pdf from a web browser. Put file:/// into
the location bar and navigate to the text file, select it and print it.

--- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05
* Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)

From Ralph Katz@21:1/5 to Loris Bennett on Fri Feb 14 03:20:01 2025

On 2/13/25 03:32, Loris Bennett wrote:

Hi,

I am using Emacs' Gnus to display a buffer containing an email.
I want to convert this email to a PDF file.

If I save the mail to a file I get:

$ file einladung.txt
einladung.txt: news or mail, Unicode text, UTF-8 text

Does anyone have a better suggestion?
[snip]

If libreoffice is installed, convert or batch convert text files to pdf:

soffice --convert-to pdf file(s)

Regards,
Ralph

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From Linux-Fan@21:1/5 to Loris Bennett on Fri Feb 14 20:10:02 2025

This is a MIME GnuPG-signed message. If you see this text, it means that
your E-mail or Usenet software does not support MIME signed messages.
The Internet standard for MIME PGP messages, RFC 2015, was published in 1996. To open this message correctly you will need to install E-mail or Usenet software that supports modern Internet standards.

Loris Bennett writes:

Hi,

I am using Emacs' Gnus to display a buffer containing an email.
I want to convert this email to a PDF file.

[...]

Does anyone have a better suggestion?

If you can get your e-mail in .eml format, you could use a tool specifically targeted at converting e-mails to PDF.

I like this one: <https://github.com/nickrussler/email-to-pdf-converter>

The tool is unfortunately not directly available in Debian, but I have defined my build instructions for creating a basic package out of it here: <https://github.com/m7a/bp-emltopdfconverter>.

I am not sure if my build instructions still work as-is because it seems I have last updated the package in 2023 - if you are interested in using them
I should be able to fix them, though.

HTH
Linux-Fan

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Converting UTF-8 email text to PDF

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