[Pine-info] Re: How to create a margin when printing?

[Lucio Chiappetti]

On Fri, 25 Aug 2006, Joe(theWordy)Philbrook wrote:


> What I can't seam to find however is a way to suppress the the printing

> of an additional page with one line such as:

> request id is hp5650-227 (1 file(s))


I do not use a2ps to print from pine, but use instead Quikscript
(http://www.itee.adfa.edu.au/~gfreeman/qs.html) which is a word processor 
written in postscript, and allows you to do whatever you want in a really 
system-independent way since the formatting is done IN THE PRINTER.

Essentially one concatenates the Quikscript "executable" (which is 
actually a postscript fle) with a sequence of "data" which in the simplest 
case is just an ASCII file, but can be also a sequence of ASCII data 
interspersed with formatting commands.
 

> I used "pine via a2ps" because I couldn't figure out how you get an actual

> message title in the header. 


I have defined in pine in my "personal printer configuration" two 
different "printers" aliased to two scripts (mailprint and print_wrap).

I report here print_wrap as a stupid demo

#! /bin/csh -f
# 
# wrapper to make print "pipable"
# for use as print command within Pine mail
#
  cat - >/tmp/print.$$
  print /tmp/print.$$
  rm /tmp/print.$$

"print" is another shell script which I use to print "normal" ASCII files 
(i.e. also - and particularly - outside of pine. It concatenates the file 
with a sequence of Quikscript commands which produce an header with the 
file name, username and date plus a page number.

"mailprint", which is the preferred one inside pine, is instead a script 
which splits the mail message into header and body. The mail header is 
printed in a tiny font, different from the font of the body. All this is 
done by Quikscript which also generates a printed file header.

The printed file header (running header one line per page) contains the 
message sender,the date of the mail message and the subject (all this 
truncated to 80 char), plus a page number.

What I've never managed to have printed (and which I'd consider useful) 
would be the number of the mail message in pine's folder. I do not know 
how to pass it to the script.

Occasionally the script fails on some subjects (I believe it has something 
to do with parentheses in the subject itself), and in such few cases I may 
use print_wrap. Or if I want to see the full header.

Note that none of the above commands specify the physical printer. This is 
set in the environment variable PRINTER outside of pine before starting 
it.

I am not including my scripts since they are not designed for general use, 
you could write your own from basic Quikscript according to your taste. I 
could however send them privately on request, with no liability, just as 
examples.

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Lucio Chiappetti - INAF/IASF - via Bassini 15 - I-20133 Milano (Italy)
For more info : http://www.iasf-milano.inaf.it/~lucio/personal.html
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