         =================================================
         =     README for OS/2 version of A2PS 4.xx      =
         =================================================

                         (20000202)


            CONTENTS OF THIS DOCUMENT:

            1) What is A2PS ?
            2) What about the OS/2 version ?
            3) Contents of this archive:
            4) Installation
            5) Building a2ps for OS/2
            6) Additional information



1) What is A2PS ?
   ************

   A very powerful tool to print various file types on your
   Postscript printer. Since it can delegate converting jobs a2ps
   can handle almost every file format, provided you have it configured
   accordingly, of course ;-)

   For more and detailled information check out the supplied documentation
   or visit it's homepage at
      http://www.inf.enst.fr/~demaille/a2ps/


2) What about the OS/2 version ?
   ***************************

   To get this utility built under OS/2 I had to work around the
   configure stuff which didn't work even using the latest Autoconf
   port.

   The National Language Support (NLS) for the executable's language
   dependent resources is not include here and I don't offer a
   shared library (dll) since I can see no further use for this library yet.
   NLS is nevertheless on my todo list.


3) Contents of the binary distribution archive:
   ********************************************

   - the binary for OS/2 (a2ps.exe)
   - the supplied shell scripts with a REXX wrapper. You need
     an installed un*x shell (named sh.exe) in your path to run them.
     NOTE: not all those utils may be included here actually!
   - all data files for encoding, pretty printing, font selection, ...
   - documentation in GNU info format and man pages as well as
     documents regarding general issues (copyright, license,
     changelog, ...)


4) Installation:
   ************

   This assumes you have my OS/2 package of a2ps. Installation from sources
   is more or less the same, once you have built the whole stuff ;-)

   - Put a2ps.exe in the path and the manpage in the manpath.
   - Adjust the configuration files (a2ps.cfg and a2ps-site.cfg)
     to your local setup. (*)

   - Store both files and the and the subdirectories
     (afm, encoding, fonts, ppd, ps, sheets) anywhere on your disk.
   - Set the environment variable A2PS_CONFIG to point to the
     your a2ps.cfg file
   - You're done ! :-)


  (*) Additional remarks to the setup:
     If you have my OS/2 binary package the .cfg files might already
     have some (more or less) reasonable default values for some settings.
     Two items are especially important:

      1) 'LibraryPath':
          it has to include all those directories mentioned above;
          don't forget to use ';' as the path separator and '/' as the
          directory separator!)
      2)  the command to print out.
          In the given example I use the lpr and lpd to access one of my
          Postscript printer queues from the commandline. "lp" is a kind of
          an alias for "lpr.exe -b -p HP5MPPSQ -s localhost" where HP5MPPSQ
          is one my Postscript printer queues. Both tools are shipped with
          Warp 4.
          If you can't work out something similar try out starting ghostview
          (or ghostscript) or print to a file first. You may want to use
          "lportd" or tools like printmon.zip (from LEO or hobbes)
      3)  Of course you have to ensure each command line given for 
          delegations. Make sure that you have the required utility
          in PATH and the SHELL used is appropriate. "/dev/null" is
          an un*x device, which is unknown to cmd.exe.


5) Building ap2s for OS/2
   **********************

   If you want to compile it yourself you will likely run into trouble
   using configure as even the latest Autoconf port may fail on this stuff.
   Either you manage to fix the configure script yourself or
   you have to create suitable versions of
     config.h
   and
     Makefile.
   Or you can just copy arch/os2/Makefile.os2 to the toplevel directory
   and type "make -f Makefile.os2" :-)


6) Additional information
   **********************

   Some OS/2 specific topics:

   - Check whether the default encoding is set properly.
     German OS/2 users may need to switch to ibm-cp850
     (see a2ps-site.cfg)
   - You can't use the OS/2 NULL device "nul" currently.
     For this purpose use "/dev/null" (supplied by emx.dll)


7) Availability
   ************

   The latest compiled version can be found on my webpages listed below.
   There you can also find the utility 'file' which a2ps likes to call
   to guess the the file type.


---
Alexander Mai
st002279@hrzpub.tu-darmstadt.de
mai@migdal.ikp.physik.tu-darmstadt.de
http://www.tu-darmstadt.de/~st002279/os2


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