Printing footers using enscript

Question

I have a working bash script which converts text files to postscript using enscript 1.6.5.90-2 on Kubuntu 14.04.

It does several other things to make the output look better like setting margins, wrapping lines, etc. (which is why I need enscript instead of other simpler printing tools.)

The script currently prints a title in the page header, but now I need a footer too.

Can anybody show me a current working example using enscript to produce footer lines?

I see --footer=FOOTER in the man page, but I also see that the default footer height is zero points. I have tried a number of ways to get footers to print. None of them produce any error messages, but they don't print footers either.

I don't have room for everything I want to see in the header alone so I need to put some of it in the footer.

Answer 1

I believe that, if you want footers, you have to write a custom hdr file and then select it with the --fancy-header option. I have written one (below) that may work for you.

There is a nine-year-old bug report on this problem. The approach in that bug report attempts a more comprehensive solution and requires re-compiling enscript. My approach is not as comprehensive but eliminates the need for a re-compile.

This header file is based on simple.hdr. To use it, copy and paste it into a file called, say, simple2.hdr, and, for system-wide use, place it in the directory /usr/share/enscript. For personal use, it can be placed in the ~/.enscript/ directory:

% -- code follows this line --
%Format: fmodstr    $D{%a %b %d %H:%M:%S %Y}
%Format: pagenumstr $V$%

%HeaderHeight: 38
%FooterHeight: 15

/do_header {   % print default simple header

  % Footer
  gsave
    d_footer_x d_footer_y HFpt_h 3 div add translate
    HF setfont

    user_footer_p {
      d_footer_x  d_footer_y moveto user_footer_left_str show

      d_footer_w user_footer_center_str stringwidth pop sub 2 div
      0 moveto user_footer_center_str show

      d_footer_x d_footer_w add user_footer_right_str stringwidth pop sub
      d_footer_y moveto user_footer_right_str show
    } if
  grestore

  % Header
  gsave
    d_header_x d_header_y HFpt_h 3 div add translate
    HF setfont

    user_header_p {
      5 0 moveto user_header_left_str show

      d_header_w user_header_center_str stringwidth pop sub 2 div
      0 moveto user_header_center_str show

      d_header_w user_header_right_str stringwidth pop sub 5 sub
      0 moveto user_header_right_str show
    } {
      5 0 moveto fname show
      45 0 rmoveto fmodstr show
      45 0 rmoveto pagenumstr show
    } ifelse
  grestore

} def

Usage is quite simple. You can then invoke it with something like:

enscript --fancy-header=simple2 --header="HEADER" --footer="LEFT|CTR|RIGHT"

Note that, although enscript supports many character sets, it does not support UTF-8. Files that are not in a natively supported character set can be filtered through iconv first before passing them to enscript.