I would like to print a file containing text with ANSI escapes.
Here is file content (generated with bash script):
\033[1m bold message example \033[0m
normal font message
When printing file to screen in terminal, it works nice:
cat example.txt
shows:
bold message example
normal font message
But my problem when I try to send it to a printer:
lp example.txt
prints:
1mbold message example2m
normal font message
Is there a way to print this file correctly ? Maybe with groff (can be used to print a styled man page), but I did not manage to get anything efficient with it...
Maybe a2ps might be able to handle that (but I am not sure, you should try).
And I would rather suggest changing the way you get such a file with ANSI escapes (that is, also provide some alternative output format).
I mean that the program producing such a file (or such an output) could instead produce a more printable output (perhaps by generating some intermediate form, e.g. LaTeX, or Lout, or groff or HTML format, then forking the appropriate command to print it. That program could also generate directly PDF thru libharu or poppler, etc....)
Also, it might depend upon your printer, and the driver.
Related
I use QT to call external programs under Ubuntu and put the output on textbrowser. However, because the external programs I want to call have colors in the shell output, the output of textbrowser is mixed with color codes. How can I remove them?
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Normally programs perform check if output is tty (terminal) and only output text with colors if it is. Do you have escape codes when you redirect output to file?
To strip color codes from terminal you can use regular expression. Check answers to this question: Removing colors from output
In SWI-Prolog Qt console I wrote this class for matching ANSI coloring sequences that must be cleaned. I replace them with the appropriate QTextCharFormat commands, you can work out something similar, replacing instead with empty strings or the CSS styling as required by your application.
Inside the source (both ansi_esc_seq.h and ansi_esc_seq.cpp) you also find a bit of documentation about the ANSI escape sequences behaviour.
How to dump output of tcptrack into a text file?
I have tried using grep and cut but the output screen of tcptrack is made with curses library and changes dynamically.
If you have ncurses-term installed, that has a minimal description glasstty:
glasstty|classic glass tty interpreting ASCII control characters,
am,
cols#80,
bel=^G, clear=^L, cr=^M, cub1=^H, cud1=^J, ht=^I, kcub1=^H,
kcud1=^J, nel=^M^J,
You could run tcptrack with that terminal description (setting TERM=glasstty) and eliminate all of the cursor-addressing. That leaves a lot of backspaces, which could be eliminated by a further reduction
eliminating the cub1 capability (using tic to compile the description of course). The reduced description would tell ncurses to repaint the whole screen for each change, which sounds like what you are expecting.
Edit the source code and remove the ncurses library and simply use printf instead of printw or simply write data to a file.
I am using Node.js to write to log files, using the colors module which I believe inserts control characters into strings, for coloring/text formatting which will display in a terminal application.
When I write to the terminal directly, it shows colors, but when I write to a .log file and then tail the log file with either Terminal.app or iterm2, it does not show colors/text formatting. Does anybody know why this is? My guess is that when you write to the log file the control characters don't get saved? In that way, when tailing they won't display at all?
Perhaps if I write to .txt file or some other type of file, the control characters will remain?
How does this work exactly? At some point the control characters are getting stripped or ignored and I am not sure how or when.
See this code.
It checks if the output is going to a terminal (by checking process.stdout.isTTY) or to somewhere else, like a file. If the latter, no color codes are outputted.
I am using a CUPs command to print the pages of documents,But it is printing all the pages ignoiring the pages option. After some investigation I came to know raw option is overwriting the pages option , Please tell me how to print the pages without using raw option ,If I am not using this option , text file not supporting error is coming ,Here is my code :
system("lpr -P AFSCMSRPRNT3 -o pages=1,2,6 -o raw -T test_womargin abc.txt"
Plain text files don't really specify how things should be printed, and thus aren't allowed.
Try to convert the text to any usable format first. There's a popular tool a2ps which should be available for every linux distribution in the world. Try that!
EDIT you seem to be confused by the word "convert":
What I meant is that instead of printing the text file, you print a postscript file generated form that; something that you can get by doing something like
a2ps -o temporaryoutput.ps input.txt
and then
lpr -P AFSCMSRPRNT3 -o pages=1,2,6 -T test_womargin temporaryoutput.ps
So I just found out I can create log files of everything I do in screen (C-a H). Sounds like a nice way to keep track of potential goofs in a particular screen session. However, when I went to try it out the logfile is reported as being a binary file (and can't be viewed like a regular text as such). So am I missing something? A quick man page looksee and searching Google (and SO) turns up nothing about this.
So my question is: How do I generate plain text log files in screen?
Assuming the answer is "What a noob... how about you try making them? RTFM." my question becomes: How do I use less to view screen logfiles I've created (since less screenlog.0 does not work on a binary file)?
EDIT: So cat works fine but less complains that the file is binary... why?
SOLUTION: as jcomeau_ictx helpfully pointed out, you can view these logfiles fine with cat or more but with less you must add the -r flag less -r screenlog.0
I just found a screenlog.0 on the net; it is plain text, with some escape sequences. Just 'cat' the file, you should be able to view it just fine.
[after more checking]
Control-A H is what generates the screenlog on my system. And though 'cat' works, you'll miss a lot of data. Use 'more' instead of 'less' to interpolate the escape codes.
I found neither less nor more nor cat to be an ideal solution for viewing screenlog files. All "replay" some of the control character so that e.g. screen deletions as produced by "clear" (don't remember the corresponding control character) are beeing shown, hiding what has been cleared.
What i know works great is: use "view" or "vi", it just shows the control character in escaped notation. Probably any other text editor works, too (not tested).
-L logs to file,
tail -f 'logfilename' to monitor this file