Saturday, December 18, 2010

Printing RFCs

I am on the Linux/Ubuntu platform. 'gedit', 'firefox' (both *.txt and *.html formats) wouldn't print RFCs in a way that put a page of contents on a page of print.

RFCs are set up for dot matrix printer days.

BUT, OpenOffice 'Writer' (and probably Microsoft Word) respect the embedded ASCII page separator and properly print the document. It even worked out of the box with the default (or that chosen for *.txt formats) font type and size.

So if you need a few pages out of an RFC:
Open it in the *.txt format from the IETF website,
Save it to the file system,
Open it in OpenOffice Writer
Open 'Print Preview' and explore to find the pages you want,
Go back to 'Print', slect the pages you want,
Print them!