masticol@paul.rutgers.edu (Steve Masticola) (01/16/89)
About once a week, I've seen someone asking how to get Mac postscript files to Unix, presumably to include in LaTeX or similar documents. I've been one of those people, and after 2 months of (intermittent) effort, the problem basically remains unsolved. Two local Mac and Postscript gurus (hi, Tara! hi, Rocky!) have also attacked this problem without success. As I understand it, there's really no trouble getting the Postscript files to Unix or including them in a document using dvi2ps. The problem is in the Mac Postscript header file, which forces the printer to use absolute addressing. This precludes moving or scaling the image, so it always takes up an entire page in the document and leaves the Postscript cursor in an unknown position. The header also has to be hacked to avoid incompatibility problems with some printers. (Please follow-up if I'm wrong about this.) Apple isn't likely to fix the problem with the Postscript header themselves, even though it would make their product more generally usable. What, then, would it take to write a translation utility to convert (at a minimum) Pict and Tiff images directly to relative-addressed, scalable Postscript? If the LaserWriter driver can't do the job right, bypass it! I would certainly pay for such a product, and I'm sure that many others would too. Especially if the developers were able to guarantee that Adobe Postscript standards and Mac image file formats would be scrupulously supported and updates would be regularly available. Just a thought. - Steve (masticol@paul.rutgers.edu)
gekdb@lindy.Stanford.EDU (Kathi Baganoff) (01/19/89)
In article <Jan.15.12.57.31.1989.25598@paul.rutgers.edu> masticol@paul.rutgers.edu (Steve Masticola) writes: > >About once a week, I've seen someone asking how to get Mac postscript >files to Unix, presumably to include in LaTeX or similar documents. >I've been one of those people, and after 2 months of (intermittent) >effort, the problem basically remains unsolved. Two local Mac and >Postscript gurus (hi, Tara! hi, Rocky!) have also attacked this >problem without success. > >[...] What, then, would it take to write a translation utility to >convert (at a minimum) Pict and Tiff images directly to >relative-addressed, scalable Postscript? If the LaserWriter driver >can't do the job right, bypass it! > >I would certainly pay for such a product, and I'm sure that many >others would too. Especially if the developers were able to guarantee >that Adobe Postscript standards and Mac image file formats would be >scrupulously supported and updates would be regularly available. Having hacked many a laser-prep for LaTeX inclusion, I heartily agree. A Postscript (as opposed to a Laserwriter) driver would be a welcome product. This would have to be a completely new driver --- a hacked laser-prep header (MD) would only work for one version of the laserwriter driver. The changes from version to version are usually very extensive. One of the big problems is that Apple uses a superset of Postscript. They use a lightly-documented feature of the laserwriter (I assume added just for Apple) called eexec. "eexec" downloads encripted 68000 object code that can do anything. In particular, apple uses eexec to define two new commands "stretch" and "smooth4" that do bitmap stretching and smoothing. Personally I would be happy with a driver that didn't support bitmap stretching and smoothing, sub-point text justification, or font substitution. Consider this a vote for a simple "True-Postscript" driver for Macintosh. Chris Uhlik uhlik@sun-valley.stanford.edu (415)328-6438