I have no more time to dedicate to html2ps :(. Its code is very hard to
understand and upstream is mostly dead. I suspect there could be better
alternatives that should be looked up by new maintainers.

If you find a good alternative, please let us lurkers know.

Last time I looked, they all[0] emitted fugly output that about as bad
as you'd get from hitting "print to file" in firefox -- not even
letting me force full justification with TeX/libhyphen hyphenation!

I don't have time or the expertise to adopt html2ps.
I could just about manage the perl bits,
but it's actually mostly PS, and my PS-fu is weak.

[0] e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PrinceXML

I would love to take good care of it, and if possible nurture it. Please
guide me to.

Best Regards


Carlos Gili

I guess you are right. I never thought of using the ps output for much
else except printing. I suppose html2ps is good for when you need to
tweak the output PS file for whatever reason. We should note, however,
that software like wkhtmltopdf allows one to define user's style sheet,
which should be good enough for tweaking most pages into a more
printable format. Although I do not know how to do hyphenation using
CSS, maybe it is not possible, so your use case is still valid.

Anyhow, as HTML and the web as whole evolve, I expect that html2ps will
be more and more left behind. We could just let it be in Debian
repositories for anyone who finds it useful until that number falls to
0. Maybe packages such as a2ps, which depend on it, should look for
other alternatives, like wkhtmltopdf. Anyway, I just don't have the
time or the will to maintain the package.

I am not a Debian Developer. If you are not one yourself, you will need
to find an sponsor. My sponsor is not doing work for Debian anymore
either, so I have no indications for you either. As far as maintaining
the package goes, I forwarded a few bugs upstream, but he is just
unresponsive.

The most important things I did was to upgrade the package to 1.0b7 and
switch to 3.0 quilt. Other than that, I expect all you are going to do
is looking around bugs that were not yet forwarded to the unresponsive
upstream and update debian policy.

Currently git repository points to my personal server, you would
probably like to make it point to some Debian repository. There is no
work there which isn't currently applied to the package, though.

If you are feeling adventurous, you can try and fix some of the bugs
yourself. That was the next thing I was thinking on doing.

Regards,
Rafael