How to convert TXT to PDF?

Question

I want to convert .txt files to .pdf. I'm using this:

ls | while read ONELINE; do convert -density 400 "$ONELINE" "$(echo "$ONELINE" | sed 's/.txt/.pdf/g')"; done

But this produces one "error" -- if there's a very long line in the text file, it doesn't get wrapped.

Input text

Screenshot of the input file

Output PDF

Screenshot of the output PDF

--

Also, it would also be great if the output PDF could contain text, instead of images of text.

I have many-many-many TXT files. So don't want to do it by hand. I need an automatic solution, like the one I mentioned above.

You should use for ONELINE in * instead of ls | while read ONELINE. Read this. — , Jun 08 '13 at 19:48
I don't have enough rep to answer, but i just want to add that the Kate editor in KDE kubuntu you can print to PDF "printer" which lets you select filename and it produces a .pdf. — mathreadler, Sep 08 '18 at 22:23
Cross-site link: same question on AskUbuntu How to print a regular file to pdf from command line - Ask Ubuntu — user202729, Feb 18 '22 at 00:17

score 58 · Answer 1 · answered Apr 05 '13 at 22:41

58

pandoc can do this. It's more focused on converting marked-up text to various formats, but it should have no problems with simple plaintext.

pandoc input.txt -o output.pdf

answered Apr 05 '13 at 22:41

evilsoup

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Looks nice, but the massive amount of haskell dependencies pandoc wants scared me away :/ – lkraav Jun 28 '13 at 11:46
1

@Ikraav yeah, it's way overkill for this purpose, but if you have markdown or HTML (or any of the other markups it can accept as input) pandoc would be the way to go. PDF actually requires even more dependencies -- internally, pandoc uses LaTeX to convert to PDF, so you need to install that stuff too -- but the quality is very good (I use it to convert markdown'd text to PDF and EPUB, primarily). – evilsoup Jun 28 '13 at 11:52
1

pandoc (1.16.0.2) replaces my newlines with tabs. – Sparhawk Jan 26 '16 at 02:34
7

Pandoc will default to Markdown. For a general plain-text this will fail. – s.ouchene May 24 '21 at 12:24
5

This removes new-lines and dramatically changes formatting. – Gabriel Staples Jan 08 '22 at 18:21
Completely useless results. It squeezed things in a column of 10 chars wide?! And all newlines were removed. – Carlo Wood May 17 '22 at 12:18
@CarloWood, here (Fedora 37, pandoc-2.14.0.3-18.fc37.x86_64) I get no such results. – vonbrand Nov 24 '22 at 10:40

Gonçalo Ribeiro · Answer 2 · 2017-07-06T23:00:08.953

32

You can print text to a PostScript file using Vim and then convert it to a PDF, as long as Vim was compiled with the +postscript feature.

For this you use the :hardcopy > {filename} command. For example you can open example.txt and execute

:hardcopy > example.ps

which will produce a file example.ps containing all the text in example.txt. The header of each page in the PostScript file will contain the original filename and the page number.

Then you can convert the PostScript file into a PDF by using the following command

ps2pdf example.ps

which will create example.pdf.

You can do the same directly from a terminal (without interacting with Vim) by using the following command

vim example.txt -c "hardcopy > example.ps | q"; ps2pdf example.ps

This opens example.txt in Vim and executes the command passed to the -c option, which in this case is a hardcopy command followed by a quit (q) command. Then it executes ps2pdf to produce the final file.

_{For more options see the help files with :help :hardcopy.}

edited Jul 06 '17 at 23:00

answered Apr 17 '16 at 01:05

Gonçalo Ribeiro

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:hardcopy produces a PostScript file no matter I add .pdf or .ps extensions. I did :hardcpy > example.pdf and with less example.pdf in shell I could see that the file header was %!PS-Adobe-3.0. – taro Jul 05 '17 at 10:31
@taro, you are correct. At the time I wrote this I didn't notice that. I updated my answer. The final command could be improved, but I can't write that right now. Might do it later. – Gonçalo Ribeiro Jul 06 '17 at 23:04
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Note that this does not support UTF-8. Looks like a call to enscript. – Sherry869 Sep 02 '21 at 16:49
More about UTF-8 printing: encoding - Printing unicode chars? - Vi and Vim Stack Exchange // syntax highlighting - How to change Vim's :hardcopy printfont? - Vi and Vim Stack Exchange – user202729 Feb 18 '22 at 01:03

score 27 · Accepted Answer · answered Jul 26 '11 at 06:53

27

One method is to use CUPS and the PDF psuedo-printer to "print" the text to a PDF file.

Another is to use enscript to encode to postscript and then convert from postscript to PDF using the ps2pdf file from ghostscript package.

answered Jul 26 '11 at 06:53

Keith

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thanks.: http://pastebin.com/raw.php?i=XQnRjtnR – LanceBaynes Jul 26 '11 at 08:11
5

doesn anybody has UTF-8 support for enscript? – LanceBaynes Jul 26 '11 at 08:12
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@LanceBaynes Cedilla, or gnome-u2ps, or u2ps. – Gilles 'SO- stop being evil' Jul 26 '11 at 20:42

score 22 · Answer 4 · answered Jul 26 '11 at 07:55

22

LibreOffice / OpenOffice as well as most other word processors (Abiword) can do this quite easily.

There is a little utility called unoconv that uses the LibreOffice code base to do file format conversions on the command line. It can read and write any combination of formats that LibreOffice can and makes it very easy to do things like doc to pdf conversions on the command line. Simple txt to pdf would be easy for it.

answered Jul 26 '11 at 07:55

Caleb

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Interesting. Didn't know about unoconv and didn't even know OO had APIs. – Faheem Mitha Jul 28 '11 at 13:45
Produces high quality results, but, for me (I'm using version 0.5-1 (Debian Wheezy)), I have to first run a unoconv --listener & command. – Digger Jan 28 '19 at 22:11
Any example commands you can provide? – Gabriel Staples Jan 08 '22 at 18:21

score 20 · Answer 5 · answered Feb 01 '18 at 19:29

20

LibreOffice works for this. Usage:

libreoffice --convert-to "pdf" file.txt

The output will be called file.pdf.

answered Feb 01 '18 at 19:29

jbrock

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Is there a way to change font size in the resulting PDF? – Evg Jun 20 '19 at 16:44
@Evg I do not know of a way to do so with this method of using LibreOffice. – jbrock Jun 20 '19 at 17:01
this only works for me – Vlad Aug 07 '20 at 08:33
2

quicker: unoconv file.txt. calling the same libreoffice. – Sherry869 Sep 02 '21 at 16:52
Thanks. I did not know about that. I just tried it, and it works very nicely. – jbrock Sep 02 '21 at 22:06
libreoffice command not found – chovy Oct 07 '21 at 23:03
@chovy It works for me on Debian 11. Either you do not have it installed, or your distro's version does not have that command associated with LibreOffice. – jbrock Oct 09 '21 at 18:15
i had to reload zsh – chovy Oct 14 '21 at 04:32

ceinmart · Answer 6 · 2013-04-05T17:32:09.800

Just use the text2pdf , which is free and opensource. At the link you can download the source or the pre-compiled binary for windows, solaris, dos.

I'm able to use it into AIX OS without problem. Very simple to compile , just save the text2pdf.c and Makefile into the same directory and type make. (here I set the variable CC=gcc on AIX, on linux this will not be an issue)

$ ./text2pdf  -h

text2pdf [options] [filename]

  text2pdf makes a 7-bit clean PDF file (version 1.1) from any input file.
  It reads from standard input or a named file, and writes the PDF file
  to standard output.

  There are various options as follows:

  -h            show this message
  -f<font>      use PostScript <font> (must be in standard 14, default: Courier)
  -I            use ISOLatin1Encoding
  -s<size>      use font at given pointsize (default 10)
  -v<dist>      use given line spacing (default 12 points)
  -l<lines>     lines per page (default 60, determined automatically
                if unspecified)
  -c<chars>     maximum characters per line (default 80)
  -t<spaces>    spaces per tab character (default 8)
  -F            ignore formfeed characters (^L)
  -A4           use A4 paper (default Letter)
  -A3           use A3 paper (default Letter)
  -x<width>     independent paper width in points
  -y<height>    independent paper height in points
  -2            format in 2 columns
  -L            landscape mode

  Note that where one variable is implied by two options, the second option
  takes precedence for that variable. (e.g. -A4 -y500)
  In landscape mode, page width and height are simply swapped over before
  formatting, no matter how or when they were defined.

text2pdf v1.1 (c) Phil Smith, 1996
$ ./text2pdf  -f"Courier" -s6 -c216 -v6 -L -A4 ./rep3.txt >rep3.pdf

@WolfgangFahl Alas, this program is not legally forkable "as is", as the file header says: "You may not alter the source in any way [...] without the permission of the author, Phil Smith phil@bagobytes.co.uk" — Totor, Nov 15 '22 at 17:44
@WolfgangFahl Alas, this program is not legally forkable "as is", as the file header says: "You may not alter the source in any way [...] without the permission of the author, Phil Smith phil@bagobytes.co.uk". This program is compiling & working on my Linux, but is from 1996 and generates PDF file version 1.1. It is fast though. — Totor, Nov 15 '22 at 17:58
For UTF-8 encoding, I am going to use puppeteer for Node.js. — Lance, Feb 11 '24 at 04:01

score 11 · Answer 7 · edited Jul 26 '11 at 12:17

11

There is also a UTF-8 to PostScript converter called paps.

edited Jul 26 '11 at 12:17

Caleb

70,105

answered Jul 26 '11 at 11:23

tunit

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It works, and with TrueType fonts, but it should be noted that it produces a document with bitmaps as a result, instead of using the fonts natively. (I guess that's because of Postscript?) – njsg Jan 29 '13 at 22:08
Couldn't compile it on Cygwin32 on my Windoze... – jarnosc Feb 18 '16 at 23:03
Not too simple, not too complicated. It will read from stdin, for example pr -e3 -t test.txt | paps – PJ Brunet Apr 30 '23 at 04:51

score 8 · Answer 8 · edited Jun 08 '13 at 20:32

8

Use enscript to created a .ps file, and then ps2pdf (or ps2pdfwr) to convert to .pdf

The following script creates a .pdf file with 10 pt left and right margins, and uses a courier font that is 7.3 pts wide and 10 pts high, so a 132 col printout fits on an 8 1/2 X 11 page. Use enscript to setup your page, fonts, etc.

$ enscript -B --margins=10:10: -o outputfile.ps -f Courier@7.3/10 inputfile
$ ps2pdfwr outputfile.ps newfile.pdf
$ rm outputfile.ps

edited Jun 08 '13 at 20:32

slm

369,824

answered Jun 08 '13 at 18:52

Dan Walker

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A thing to note: enscript does not support utf-8. – maxschlepzig Aug 16 '14 at 13:51
Without utf-8, that means no Chinese characters, etc.. Going to use puppeteer for this. – Lance Feb 11 '24 at 04:01

score 3 · Answer 9 · answered Nov 29 '19 at 19:10

Since it's included by default in many distributions, a shorter way to call libreoffice from the cli:

soffice --convert-to pdf input.txt

Supported extensions by soffice, we can convert from/to:

ODF Spreadsheet                   .ods
ODF Spreadsheet Template          .ots
Flat XML ODF Spreadsheet          .fods
Unified Office Format Spreadsheet .uos
Microsoft Excel 2007-2013 XML     .xlsx
Microsoft Excel 2003 XML          .xml
Microsoft Excel 97-2003           .xls
Microsoft Excel 97-2003 Template  .xlt
Data Interchange Format           .dif
dBase                             .dbf
HTML Document (Calc)              .html
SYLK                              .slk
Text CSV                          .csv
Office Open XML Spreadsheet       .xlsx
Microsoft Excel 2007-2016 XML     .xlsm

Kheng · Answer 10 · 2020-12-19T14:01:32.933

3

I am adding this a2ps as another alternative. a2ps produces postscript file, then could be converted into pdf using ps2pdf. Both a2ps and ps2pdf should be in the major Linux distros repository.

a2ps input.txt -o output.ps
ps2pdf output.ps output.pdf

edited Dec 19 '20 at 14:01

answered Dec 19 '20 at 13:55

Kheng

41

May have problems with some apostrophe characters, but probably easy to fix with search/replace. – PJ Brunet Apr 30 '23 at 02:15

jahly · Answer 11 · 2023-04-23T05:49:21.383

1

Easiest way using calibre

install (on .deb-based distributions):
```
sudo apt-get install calibre
```

then run:

ebook-convert /path/to/input.txt path/to/ouput.pdf

edited Apr 23 '23 at 05:49

answered Apr 21 '23 at 05:57

jahly

33

1

My apologies, what I meant with "*" is any name, but now I get it this wildcard could be translated to multiple inputs, I'm going to edit it now. – jahly Apr 23 '23 at 05:48
Ok, then I understand the original intention. The edit really helps to clarify! – AdminBee Apr 24 '23 at 06:45

score 0 · Answer 12 · answered Mar 30 '23 at 11:09

It is also possible to wrap the text from the input text file into a helper Latex document:

\documentclass{letter}
\begin{document}
\input{input.txt}  % text file with the input text
\end{document}

and then compile it directly to PDF using pdflatex:

$ pdflatex helper.tex

How to convert TXT to PDF?

Input text

Output PDF

12 Answers12

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