Hi Chris, Man that's just awesome. Some to read, and a fix that works instantly. Thanks a bunch. Paul. On Feb 27, 2012, at 5:04 PM, Chris Blouch wrote:
> 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. >> > > -- > You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups > "MacVisionaries" group. > To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. > To unsubscribe from this group, send email to > macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. > For more options, visit this group at > http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en. > -- You received this message because you are subscribed to the Google Groups "MacVisionaries" group. To post to this group, send email to macvisionaries@googlegroups.com. To unsubscribe from this group, send email to macvisionaries+unsubscr...@googlegroups.com. For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/macvisionaries?hl=en.
