Printing UTF-8 text via command line (i.e. 10.5-ready enscript for UTF-8)

Question

Hello,
(I asked this question in the Leopard discussion section, but was advised to use this forum.)
I am using some terminal-based tools like Alpine and Vim, both with UTF-8 text encoding. Printing, however, is a problem, because the UTF-8 characters are not correctly printed. For Alpine I use enscript, but it does not support UTF-8. (Currently I convert UTF-8 to latin1 first using iconv before sending it to enscript, but special characters get lost that way.) For Vim I use CUPS-PDF, a virtual PDF printer, but also here UTF-8 characters does not make it (even though CUPS-PDF works for UTF-8 in Cocoa apps).
Paps as an alternative to enscript may work, but I don't want to spend much time currently installing all necessary libraries.
I am wondering if I can use Leopard's printing natively. *Is there a command line tool ready for OS 10.5 that accepts UTF-8 text and converts it to PS/PDF or sends it directly to a selected printer queue?*
Thanks!

Answer 1

I think you can use enscript for 8 bit code. You just have to set the option. if you check the users guide you may be able to use an option to honor 8 bit code. I haven't tried it, but my .enscriptrc looks like
cat .enscriptrc
# GNU Enscript configuration file.
# Author: Stanley Williams
# Local Version
# How characters greater than 127 are printed:
# 1 generate clean 7-bit code; print characters greater than 127
# in the backslash-octal notation `\xxx' (default)
# 0 generate 8-bit code
Clean7Bit: 1
# Default input encoding.
# DefaultEncoding: mac
# Default output media.
DefaultMedia: Letter
# Media definitions:
# name width height llx lly urx ury
Media: Legal 612 1008 24 24 588 984
Media: Letter 612 792 36 36 576 756
# Pass following Page Device options to the generated output.
# Duplex printing.
SetPageDevice: Duplex:true
Hope this helps.