Ubuntu 8.04 apps (gedit and vim) display properly on screen - fonts and font size look good, but when sent to a printer, print out with about an 8 and some generic font???

TIA

File format?

format is whatever is native to vim. The file was created and is maintained across an ssh connection using vim.

well plain text files generally don't have formatting for font, size etc.

Heh well that seems reasonable. I just found out that formatting font and size added or changed in gedit and saved to disk, retains that formatting as far as gedit is concerned, but only for screen display. Turns out there is a separate Font setting in the File > Print menu.

Additionally, I just found that data with a large font saved from gedit does not show the saved formatting when printed to the printer using the lpr note syntax.

So that looks like gedit creates pseudo plain test files, where formatting is retained for use by the saving program, but appears to be plain text to other apps!
strange stuff. :-)

You may even find gedit adds that new formatting to every file it gets, and that its changed in a config file stored in ~/.gconf/apps/gedit-2/preferences somewhere

Thans for the help. I'll keep pounding on it :-)

AFAIK, basic editors, eg vim, gedit, kate(?) may show format/font layouts for your convenience, but they do not save them, as they are usually used for editing plain text eg shell files. The system would get very confused if you tried to run a file that has embedded font codes.
If you want a fancy printout, use OpenOffice - Writer.