This is a perfect example of the kind of stuff you can do in the unix
shell of terminal. Save a text file somewhere handy like your desktop. I
called mine test.txt. Then open terminal and cd to wherever you have
the file. So for me I did
cd ~/Desktop
then use the fold command which breaks text files into fixed length
lines like this:
fold -w30 -s test.txt
The -s parameter says to break lines on spaces. If you don't mind it
breaking in the middle of a word you can leave that out. If you someday
splurge on a 40 cell display just change the 30 to a 40. That at least
gets you partway there. The shell has the idea of a pipe written as "|"
where the output of one command becomes the input to the next. So we can
pipe the output from fold to the input of the "pr" command which lets us
insert page breaks like this:
fold -w30 -s test.txt | pr -tF -l27
the pr command normally adds headers and such to each page which we
suppress with the -t option. The F option says to output real
pagrebreaks rather than a bunch of extra newlines. The L parameter, as
you can guess, is how many lines before a pagebreak.
To learn more about the fold or pr commands just type "man" followed by
the command to get more details from the manual pages. man man tells you
about the manual itself. Of course you probably want to write all this
good stuff back out to a file. To do that we want to redirect the output
to a file instead of the terminal. To do that we add a redirect using
the ">" and then a filename to the end of the recipe like this:
fold -w30 -s test.txt | pr -tF -l27 > fixed.txt
and you should find a fixed.txt file on your desktop all nicely
formatted. Welcome to the dark underbelly of OSX where great power and
capability lie, if you can just find the right man page :)
CB
On 2/27/12 6:47 AM, John Sanfilippo wrote:
Oo, I have much the same concern, so I'm looking forward to hearing more about
this.
js
On Feb 27, 2012, at 9:42 AM, Paul Erkens wrote:
Dear listers,
I have an old braille printer that is not attached to my mac. To emboss
something, all I have to do is create simple plain text files with 27 lines per
page, and no more than 30 characters per line. Looking at how text edit handles
printing however, that works with inches or centimeters, and in general, with a
bitmap, the size of the paper you choose to print on. Characters, lines and the
whole page can be scaled.
However, what I need for my braille printer is to ignore scaling, and tell text
edit to wrap to the next line after 30 characters max, and a page break after
27 lines, no matter which font size etc I choose, because fonts etc are not
important in braille.
Once a text document has been loaded in text edit, how do I reformat it, so
that it writes a carriage return line feed pair at the end of each line of 30
characters most, and a page break, control l, at the end of 27 lines? Very
interested. I'm now doing it all by hand, but since I received 8 songs from my
choir all at once, I'm hoping to learn an easier way to reformat typed text
into something my braille printer can handle. That braille printer is on
windows, but I'd rather do all the preparations in text edit, than on a windows
machine. Is it possible to make text edit do what I need here?
Paul.
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