Re: [gentoo-desktop] Adding a text fiile printer (or any printer) in OpenOffice

[Lindsay Haisley]

On Mon, 2007-05-28 at 22:11 -0500, Lindsay Haisley wrote:
> I have some very old (Wordstar 3) documents which I'd like to print to a
> plain text file with simple newlines, page headers and footers, etc, so
> I need a generic printer with a "print to file" option.  There's no such
> printer available on OpenOffice, so I tried to add one.

Actually, it looks like if I set up a printer in cups, it shows up in
OpenOffice, so that question is answered, but I still can't get a proper
likeness of the document to file.

The document was created in Wordstar 3 under CP/M in the 80s.  I managed
to get it properly imported into Microsoft Word using a rather obscure
input filter, and the resulting MS Word file was partially true to the
original formatting.  I opened this file in OpenOffice and did a fair
amount of work to bring the page and line formatting back to original.
Wordstar did soft hyphens at line ends - which had gotten lost in
conversion - and I had to replace these and a bunch of the indentation
to restore the full justificiation of all paragraphs as the origignal
had.

The resulting document uses a Courier non-prop. font and I'd like to be
able to print it to a text file _just as it looks_ and preserve all the
indentation, centering and justification.  Seems like just about any
format I save it to, however (HTML, RTF, text) loses these features and
I'll have another job ahead of me re-formatting everything again in vim
or some other text editor.  This can be done, but I'm wondering if
there's any way to get text output from OpenOffice that's truer to the
original appearance.

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