If you are on Linux and want to print some code and also make it look pretty then check out a2ps (Any to postscript filter). Of course if you can avoid printing in the first place and saving paper and trees and make it greener that is ideal – however there are times that is not possible. I tried printing from CDT, but the printing options from CDT just looks plain ugly and big fonts and can spread over 10 pages for a simple code file (spanning 293 lines). Sure I can tweak the font in CDT, but that is the only option available – enter a2ps. It seems to have more options, but I have not had a chance to play with those.
For example if I wanted a C++ code file called MOOSSniffer.cpp and “print it” out as PDF then use the command shown below. Here “-E” is the option to make the code look pretty and the “-P pdf” is the option for printing to PDF. Next comes the source file (you can also provide multiple files such as *.cpp) and finally the -o option is for the output filename. Of course you will need to install a2ps, which you can do via System -> Admin -> Synaptic Package Manager
a2ps -E -P pdf MOOSSniffer.cpp -o MOOSSniffer.pdf
Now, for some reason the resulting PDF could not be opened in Acrobat Reader, but on my Ubuntu machine, I could open it using the “Document Viewer” and print it using that. And in case you were curious, the pretty page option came to 3 pages instead of the original 10.
Also no trees were harmed in the making of this post – my printouts were all to PDF and not real paper – but in the end I did print out the 3 page version. 
Similar posts to check out:
- March 4, 2011 -- Twitter Trends (0)
I was excited to find that Twitter had a JSON (Javascript Object Notation) endpoint for the current trending topics and decided to write a simple consumer which can read this and then spit it out in a simple console. And JSON being so simple and more or less “universal” meant that there are multiple implementations for .NET. Of course if you got lots of bandwidth you can roll out your own parser.
I ended up using Json.NET, which in addition to being OpenSource is also one of the most robust u... - January 16, 2011 -- Opensource ZigBee stack? (1)
I was planning on getting the Telegesis ETRX2USB and wanted to know if there are any open source (or shareware) open source ZigBee stacks that I can use with that?
I also wanted to know if there is any opensource (or not too expensive), network management or network analyser for a ZigBee network? Essentially I want to be able to programatically view network and node information on the ZigBee network (e.g. S/N ratio, signal strength, etc.) - something similar to Ember's Insight Desktop which sho... - December 29, 2010 -- C++ Message queuing options? (1)
I am thinking of implementing a queue in one of the projects I am working on right now (sorry cannot go into more details until it gets published - hopefully in a few months). Anywyas, this is in C++ which needs to run on Ubuntu and my queueing experience (with C++ or otherwise) is only with MSMQ which is brilliant, but does not help me here as that run only on Windows. I also cannot use something like STL Queue as this will need to run across a number of machines and trying to sync between them...
Tags: .code, .opensource
