2. Installation

2.1. System requirements

Muttprint was realized in the programming language Perl which requires a functioning Perl interpreter in version 5. This should be true on every Linux systems by default.

Make sure that a LaTeX distribution (I recommend teTeX higher than version 1.0) plus the programs psselect and psnup from the PS-Utils are available on your system. The last are only necessary if you want to use paper save mode and/or duplex printing; and they are not necessary if you use CUPS and if you configured Muttprint to use it, see Section 3.1.2.

All required LaTeX packages are included in teTeX. If you use another LaTeX distribution, read the file README.latex, which contains information about all required packages. You have to install all packages, that are not present on your system.

For parsing the date, Muttprint uses the Perl module Date::Parse[1] [2]. If the module is not installed, Muttprint works without problems except the function to convert the time zone and print the date in the local language, see Section 3.1.7.

To have support for the charset UTF-8 the LaTeX command for changing the charset must support UTF-8. This is naturally not the case! You'll find a suitable extension in the CTAN. Just download the file ftp://ftp.dante.de/tex-archive/macros/latex/contrib/supported/unicode.tar.gz and install it as described in the file INSTALL which is included. You only need UTF-8 support if your mail client delivers Muttprint with UTF-8 encoded data.

2.2. Installation of the files on your computer

2.3. Integration of Muttprint in mail and news clients

Muttprint was orginally developed for the use together with Mutt only. However, it could be integrated in following mail programs without problems. I got some description of users. Muttprint would be work independently of Mutt in future, too.

2.3.1. Mutt

You have to add or change following line in the file $HOME/.muttrc or system wide in /usr/local/etc/Muttrc:

set print_command="muttprint"

Moreover you must make sure that all necessary headers are dumped when the mail is printed out. The easiest way is to write a small macro (in your ~/.muttrc) which makes sure that all headers are dumped. Only the most important headers are really printed (see Section 3.1.20).

Here's the macro:

# Dump all headers
macro index p "<display-toggle-weed> <print-message> <display-toggle-weed> <exit>"
macro pager p "<display-toggle-weed> <print-message> <display-toggle-weed>"
			

At first, the macro switches to the mode where all headers are shown, then the mail is printed and finally it switches back. It is necessary to turn the confirmation of printing off so that the macro works right:

# No confirmation before printing
set print="yes"
			

To print more than one mail sensible in one step, you should add following entry:

# Print every mail extra
set print_split
			

You'll find more information in the documentation of Mutt (/usr/local/share/doc/mutt/manual.txt(.gz)).

Notes

[1]

http://www.cpan.org/authors/id/GBARR/TimeDate-1.10.tar.gz

[2]

You find details about the installation in this file. Normally, using the following procedure should work:

$ tar xvfz Time-Date-1.10.tar.gz

$ perl Makefile.PL

$ make

$ make test

# make install