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1.1 Description

a2ps formats files for printing on a PostScript printer.

The format used is nice and compact: normally two pages on each physical page, borders surrounding pages, headers with useful information (page number, printing date, file name or supplied header), line numbering, pretty-printing, symbol substitution etc. This is very useful for making archive listings of programs or just to check your code in the bus. Actually a2ps is kind of bootstrapped: its sources are frequently printed with a2ps :).

While at the origin its names was derived from “ASCII to PostScript”, today we like to think of it as “Any to PostScript”. Indeed, a2ps supports delegations, i.e., you can safely use a2ps to print DVI, PostScript, LaTeX, JPEG etc., even compressed.

A short list of features of a2ps might look like this:

• - Customizable through various configuration files (see Configuration Files)
• - Powerful escapes to define the headers, table of contents etc. the way you want (see Escapes);
• - Variables to push even further the customizability in a comfortable manner (see Your Variables);
• - Open approach of encodings (see Encodings);
• - Excellent support of the Latin 2, 3, 4, 5 and 6 encodings, thanks to Ogonkify (see Overview in Ogonkify manual), written by Juliusz Chroboczek.
• - Fully customizable output style: fonts, background and foreground colors, line numbering style etc. (see Designing PostScript Prologues).
• - Possibility to delegate the processing of some files to other filters (see Your Delegations).
• - Many contributions, e.g., pretty-print diffs, print reference cards of programs, sanitize broken PostScript files, print Duplex on Simplex printers etc. (see Contributions).
• - And finally, the ability to pretty-print sources written in quite a few various languages (see Pretty Printing).