ibm-cp437 page not mapping to postscript file

Hey guys,

I'm a member in good standing thru 2010 so don't yell at me if this ain't a bug!

I have been using this utility for several years and can usually figure out how to make it work
but don't seem to be having any luck with an old DOS era file conversion.  This file
was apparently created using the ibm-cp437 on the old original PC.

I went thru some convolutions but got it to diplay correctly on a terminal with "less" using these
steps:

1) Find the font, search synaptic package manager for "cp437"
2) Install the font using package manager synaptic: xfonts-terminus-dos
3) Look up all the available fonts on the system in X:
hgh@opieubuntu:~/MAC/UBUNTU/DOCS/C&ASSEMBLEY$ xlsfonts | grep cp437
terminus-dos-cp437-12
terminus-dos-cp437-14
terminus-dos-cp437-16
terminus-dos-cp437-20
terminus-dos-cp437-24
terminus-dos-cp437-28
terminus-dos-cp437-32
terminus-dos-cp437-bold-12
terminus-dos-cp437-bold-14
terminus-dos-cp437-bold-16
terminus-dos-cp437-bold-20
terminus-dos-cp437-bold-24
terminus-dos-cp437-bold-28
terminus-dos-cp437-bold-32

4) Start up a new xterm with the correct font: "xterm -font terminus-dos-cp437-12"

But when I try to create a "ps" file followed by a pdf file like so:

a2ps --encoding=IBM-CP437 -R --columns=1 -f 5.0  programmers_tech_reference.txt -o programmers_tech_reference.ps
ps2pdf programmers_tech_reference.ps programmers_tech_reference.pdf

I don't get the cp437  encoding in the output postsrcipt file but some old crufty UTF-8 or ISO-8859-X
output with a bunch of funky looking A's and I's instead of the DOS line drawing characters I'm looking for.

Is this a bug or have I done something wrong?

hgh,
Henry Hollenberg
[email protected]