[comp.sys.mac] Wanted: Encapsulated Postscript from PICT Files

andreasg@newsigi.Colorado.EDU (Andreas Girgensohn) (03/23/90)

I would like to produce encapsulated Postscript from figures that I've made
with MacIntosh drawing programs (MacDraw II, Canvas, ...).  I want to include
the encapsulated Postscript into Scribe documents (Scribe is a text formatter
on Unix systems).  Holding down the 'F' key during printing is not good enough
since it does not compute the bounding box.  Exporting Postscript from
FreeHand is fine but it does not produce Postscript for pictures pasted in
from the clipboard.

Can anybody give me pointers to commercially available programs that can do
what I need?  Or has anybody written a Pascal, C, or Lisp program that
produces Postscript from PICT files?

Please respond by e-mail since I don't read this group.

Thanks in advance,

Andreas Girgensohn
andreasg@boulder.colorado.edu

andreasg@boulder.Colorado.EDU (Andreas Girgensohn) (03/28/90)

I got several responses to my question.  I want to thank everybody who has
responded.  Here is a summary with some comments from me:

Chris Hegarty (hegarty@janus.berkeley.edu), Charles Allen
(cca@newton.physics.purdue.edu), Maurice Volaski
(volaski@contra.med.buffalo.edu), Andreas Guelzow (guelzow@ccu.umanitoba.ca),
and Margret Buckley (buckley@sumex-aim.stanford.edu) suggested to use the
"Canvas Separator" utility that is included in Canvas 2.1.  It worked perfect.

Bruce Long (ICBAL@ASUACAD.BITNET) wrote:
> Although Cricket Draw is showing its age and hasn't been upgraded in
> quite a while, it is superb for saving in EPS format, even including
> pictures which have been pasted in.  For this and many other reason,
> I find Cricket Draw preferable to many of the more modern programs.

Unfortunately, the offset of the bounding box was wrong in my experiments.
The size of the bounding box was correct.

Leo Bores (Leo.Bores@f14.n114.z1.fidonet.org) wrote:
> My suggestion would be to OPEN such a PICT file in FREEHAND. In so doing, the 
> file is converted to the FreeHand format which can then be saved as an EPS 
> file. I do this all the time. This will not work in Illustator.

I could not open PICT files with FreeHand version 1.0.

Richard Fozzard (fozzard@boulder.colorado.edu) wrote:
> 	I have a utility that came with Adobe Illustrator 88 called
> DrawOver that supposedly generates standard Illustrator editable files
> (from which, of course, Illustrator can give you encapsulated PS, w/o
> even doing the cmd-F/K trick). I have not tested this, but my Illustrator
> manual claims it will work.

Paul Eric Menchen (meuchen@grad1.cis.upenn.edu) wrote:
> What about printing out the image (on the Mac) to determine a bounding box.
> You could then modify a cmd-f file to make it epsf. Believe it or not,
> I believe printing it out and measuring the output is a recommended
> way of determining the bounding box coordinates in one of the Adobe
> (Red, Blue, Green) postscript books.  I believe this was discussed in
> comp.lang.postscript a few months ago.