UNIX for Dummies Questions & Answers

Hi Friends,
Can anybody pls tell me how to print a letter on letter-head thro' unix? There is certain format of that document in which it has some sentences which are in ‘Bold'.

Current process that I m following is:-
Run the script to generate the letter details
Copy it from unix to MS Word
Make certain sentences bold
Print the final document


Want to automate this entire process (Want to print directly thro' Unix)

How do I do it. Please help me, it will save my hell lot of time and manual work.

There are at least two distinct problems here.

To produce rich-text output, use a rich-text formatter such as troff or TeX or ReST or Markdown. There are also various XML-based toolchains but all except troff tend to basically boil down to converting the output to TeX or LaTeX, then printing that.

Actually printing a hardcopy of the resulting output (usually a PostScript file or PDF) is a separate problem altogether, and hinges a lot on your hardware, operating system, and local conventions.

Ohk Era, didnt kno that this task is that complications. So how can i do now.. what ll the things i would need?

Find a rich-text format which is suitable for your needs. I would suggest you look at something simple like ReST or Markdown or (if you're into classics) troff, but this depends a lot on your other needs. ReST and Markdown are intended as "light" alternatives to HTML for blogging, but extend nicely to more-complex documents, to a point. However, the machinery for producing nice-looking paper output is still evolving, and might turn out to have some unattractive problems. (I bumped into UTF-8 and table-formatting issues when I tried to use ReST to produce PDF files via their LaTeX formatting back-end. Getting TeX up and running is IMHO still not for the weak of heart; but if you have it installed and running already, that might not be an issue.)

If all you need is pretty-printed output with a few snippets in boldface, the necessary troff codes are easy enough to add with a simple script, and you probably have all the necessary software installed on your system already. If you need more complex features, however, the learning curve is rather steep, and not a lot of people are able to help you. This is what Bell Labs used to produce patent applications and books back in the 1970s, so it's proven, but the skill set is not exactly in the vogue any longer, and it never was very newbie-friendly.

Ohh i think I should drop the idea of automating this process :-(

Before you give up, try the following.

Code:

groff -Tutf8 <<HERE | head -1
This is regular,
.ft B
bold,
.ft
and regular again.

Producing PostScript from the same input is a simple matter, and if your printer etc are correctly configured, printing should be a snap.

See also GNU Troff (Groff) Manuals Online

An alternative mark-up would of course be HTML, and you could simply print from your browser. html2ps is also good for producing PostScript output from HTML in a completely automatic fashion (although it, too, has its limitations, e.g. with UTF8; but given its origins, it's rather impressive).