I am trying to print a large quantity (several megabytes) of UTF-8 encoded text which consists of Chinese and Latin characters (and maybe a sprinkling of others). I would like to print it in several columns per page, in a very small, condensed font, preferably with control over line spacing. I'd quite like inter-column lines, but I can live without them. The aim is to print to PDF for transfer, as well as to paper.I have tried enscript and a2ps, but neither of these support Unicode.I have also tried paps, but this produces bitmapped outputs which cannot be PDF'd effectively, and also look terrible.Is there a modern way to print UTF-8 text like this without resorting to something like constructing it manually in Python?
Printing UTF-8 (including Chinese) text
text processing;printing;unicode;postscript
Cedilla is a text-to-postscript converter, similar to enscript and a2ps, with good Unicode support but a lot fewer configuration possibilities. I don't think Cedilla can to multi-column.If you want fine control over the formatting, you can use LaTeX. LaTeX's support for going beyond 8 bits is a bit problematic, but tools now exist to typeset Chinese fairly painlessly. Here's some untested code, inspired by How does one type Chinese in LaTeX? and Include data from a .txt on our sister site about TeX. You can customize the appearance of the text by changing the options passed to \VerbatimInput from the fancyvrb package.cat <<'EOF' >driver.tex\documentclass[UTF8]{ctexart}\usepackage{multicol}\usepackage{fancyvrb}\setlength\columnseprule{.5pt}\begin{document}\begin{multicols}{2}\VerbatimInput[fontfamily=cmr]{stuff.txt}\end{multicols}\end{document}EOFpdflatex driver.tex