GNU Enscript Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ)

Misc

Character Sets

• How can I use ibmpc's line drawing characters?

  First, you will need a PostScript font (.pfa or .pfb) which has those line drawing characters. This is the most trickiest task since these fonts are really rare. Once you find one, you must make it available for enscript (see file README for details) so it can be downloaded to the printer.

  Since these suitable fonts are so rare, the ibmpc encoding do not contain mappings for those line drawing characters, this means they won't print if you use the ibmpc encoding. You must rely on the font's build-in encoding and print your files with option `-X ps' or `--encoding=ps'.

• I tried the iso8859/2 input encoding but enscript says that 44 characters were missing and I get '?' on paper instead of latin2 characters. Did I missed something? (This answer holds also for other input encodings).

  No, everything is ok but the problem is that Adobe's default Courier font does not have characters named: Aogonek, Lcaron, Sacute, Tcaron, Zacute, ... (those 44 missing characters) so enscript can't print them. You can solve this if you have a courier (or whatever) font that has those missing characters. One good canditate is courier font distributed with the X distribution, it is called cour.pf{a,b} and should be found from all good FTP sites.

  To solve this problem, you must:

  1. find a nice font to do the job.
  2. copy this font and its AFM file to some appropriate directory, let's say `$HOME/fonts/':

     $ ls fonts/cour*
     fonts/cour.afm  fonts/cour.pfa
     

  3. create a font map for this new font directory (mkafmmap program comes with the enscript distribution):

     $ cd fonts
     $ mkafmmap *.afm
     file=font.map
     BrushScript.afm...
     Hobo.afm...
     Stencil.afm...
     cour.afm...
     uaqrrc.afm...
     ugqb.afm...
     unmr.afm...
     unmrs.afm...
     

  4. edit enscript's personal (or the global) configuration file to use this new font:

     $ cat ~/.enscriptrc
     #
     # My enscript init file.
     #
     
     DefaultFancyHeader: emacs
     
     #PageLabelFormat: long
     
     Clean7Bit: 0
     
     AFMPath: /home/mtr/fonts:/usr/local/share/enscript
     

  5. now it should work:

     $ cd myprogs/enscript/
     $ enscript -v -G2r -pfoo.ps latin2.txt
     AFM: scanning path...
     AFM: reading font map "/home/mtr/fonts/font.map"
     AFM: reading font map "/usr/local/share/enscript/font.map"
     reading AFM info for font "Courier"
     processing file "latin2.txt"...
     [ 3 pages * 1 copy ] left in foo.ps
     

  Now enscript uses this new courier font that has those missing characters. Since the font file `.pfa' is found from the font path, enscript automatically includes that font file to your PostScript output. This means that it can be printed with any PostScript printer; now file really contains that font so it does not depend on printer's fonts.

Printing, Output Media

• I printed some documents with options `-G2r', everything goes just fine but there are no page numbers in the upper right corner. What goes wrong?
  You are probably using wrong output media; your printer uses different output media than enscript. Check what is your default output media in the enscript.cfg (and $HOME/.enscriptrc) file and change it if needed. For example, to change enscript's default media A4 to Letter, you must to do the following change:

  # Default output media.
  DefaultMedia: A4
  =>
  DefaultMedia: Letter
  

  You can also set the default output media during the configuration step, just give configure script option

  --with-media[=media]

  If no media is given, it defaults to Letter.

• How can I change margins under enscript?
  You have to define a new output media which has better margins. This is quite easy, just define the new media in enscript's configuration file. For example, below is a new `A4BigMargin' media with bigger margins:

  # Media definitions:
  #	name		width	height	llx	lly	urx	ury
  Media:	A3		839	1190	18	17	821	1173
  Media:	A4		595	839	18	17	581	822
  Media:	A5		420	595	18	17	406	578
  Media:  Letter		612	792	18	17	597	776
  Media:	Legal		612	1008	18	17	597	992  
  
  Media:   A4BigMargin	595	839	36	34	563	805
  

  You can select this media by giving enscript option `-M A4BigMargin' or by setting it to be your default output media by editing enscript.cfg:

  # Default output media.
  DefaultMedia: A4
  =>
  DefaultMedia: A4BigMargin
  

• Ghostscript does not show enscript's outputs correctly, what's the problem?
  There is one minor problem in enscript / ghostscript co-operation. Enscript's default output media is A4 (because I live in Europe) and GhostScript's default output media is Letter. There are two solutions for this problem:
  1. Fix Enscript
     Add / edit following line to file enscript.cfg:

     # Default output media.
     DefaultMedia: A4 
     
     =>
       
     # Default output media.
     DefaultMedia: Letter
     

  2. Fix GhostScript
     edit following line to file gs_init.ps:

     % Optionally choose a default paper size other than U.S. letter.
     % (a4) /PAPERSIZE where { pop pop } { /PAPERSIZE exch def } ifelse
     
     =>
     
     % Optionally choose a default paper size other than U.S. letter.
     (a4) /PAPERSIZE where { pop pop } { /PAPERSIZE exch def } ifelse
     

     or give ghostscript option -sPAPERSIZE=a4