Red Hat Bugzilla – Bug 142590
a2ps has troubles with counting
Last modified: 2007-11-30 17:10:56 EST
Description of problem: 'a2ps' seem to be easily confused about locations of particular pieces in an output. Try with the following fake /etc/hosts # Do not remove the following line, or various programs # that require network functionality will fail. 127.0.0.1 localhost.localdomain localhost 123.123.123.200 some.hosts.somewhere some where fields are separated by tabs and not strings of spaces and with a command like a2ps -o /tmp/hosts.ps < hosts to see a scrambled output. Giving it various ridiculously high counts for tabs, like in a2ps -T 40 -o /tmp/hosts.ps < hosts may improve the situation in some places but in other may have weird side-effects which do not seem to be "monotonic in a declared tab size". OTOH doing expand hosts | a2ps -o /tmp/hosts.ps with the file above produces something reasonable. 'a2ps' also wraps long lines. The problem is that wrapping is done way past the right margin. expand /etc/fstab | a2ps -o /tmp/fstab.ps will likely be good enough to demonstrate that. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): a2ps-4.13b-43
What version of urw-fonts have you got installed?
I got the same trouble on FC3 installation with a2ps-4.13b-41 and on a test machine with a2ps-4.13b-43. On FC3 a2ps was always in a default configuration, i.e. /etc/a2ps.cfg and /usr/share/a2ps/afm/fonts.map. In both cases the same urw-fonts-2.2-6.noarch are installed. Yes, I thought about metrics too but adding to a2ps serch path /usr/X11R6/lib/X11/fonts/Type1 directory and modyfying fonts.map to use cour.afm or c0419bt_.afm (Courier10PitchBT-Roman) instead does not change really anything in the picture. I do not recall now if I tried on x86 setup, although I thought that I did, or only on x86_64 machines.
What about if you downgrade urw-fonts to 2.1-7 from FC2? See bug #140584.
Indeed, this is another manifestation of the same bug #140584. After replacing urw-fonts with 2.1-7 I do not even have to use 'expand' and in a2ps output pieces of a text do not bump into each other and they wrap, if they are too long, on the right margin.
*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 140584 ***
Changed to 'CLOSED' state since 'RESOLVED' has been deprecated.