PDFPipe

A command-line tool in Python. Pass it one or more text files, or pipe something from stdin, and it will produce a text-only PDF file.

Handy for quickly printing plain text content in a clean and predictable format. Specify font, font size, orientation and paper size from the command line.

Installation

Grab the file pdfpipe.py and execute it, or:

pip install pdfpipe

Or, you can download the source and

python setup.py install

or

sudo python setup.py install

if required.

Command-Line Usage

In your command-line:

echo "Hello from a PDF file named output.pdf" | pdfpipe.py

Or

pdfpipe.py -p -b -o printable.pdf -s 14 -g Letter --title "Reports for today" report*.txt

Type

pdfpipe.py --help

for more information on the available options.

Fonts and Unicode

The FPDF library knows about the following font families:

Courier, Arial, Times, Symbol, ZapfDingbats

Which can all be chosen as the font with the -f option. By default, Courier will be used for the monospace font, Arial (helvetica) for proportional (-p).

If you need to print non-latin text, or want a different font for any other reason, instead specify the full path to a TTF font file. E.g.:

./pdfpipe.py unicode_text.txt -f "/Library/Fonts/Arial Unicode.ttf"