How to print text files in Ubuntu Karmic (Shallow Thoughts)

Akkana's Musings on Open Source Computing and Technology, Science, and Nature.

Mon, 25 Jan 2010

How to print text files in Ubuntu Karmic

Ever since I upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 "Karmic koala", printing text files has been a problem. They print out with normal line height, but in a super-wide font so I only get about 48 ugly characters per line.

Various people have reported the problem -- for instance, bug 447961 and this post -- but no one seemed to have an answer.

I don't have an answer either, but I do have a workaround. The problem is that Ubuntu is scaling incorrectly. When it thinks it's putting 10 characters per inch (cpi) on a line, it's actually using a font that only fits 6 characters. But if you tell it to fit 17 characters per inch, that comes out pretty close to the 10cpi that's supposed to be the default:

lpr -o cpi=17 filename

As long as you have to specify the cpi, try different settings for it. cpi=20 gives a nice crisp looking font with about 11.8 characters per inch. If needed, you can adjust line spacing with lpi=NN as well.

Update: The ever-vigilant Till Kamppeter has tracked the problem down to the font used by texttopdf for lp/lpr printing. Interesting details in bug 447961.

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[ 16:36 Jan 25, 2010    More linux | permalink to this entry | ]

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