scpinker@pikes.Colorado.EDU (Scott C. Pinkerton) (07/12/90)
Hello, I am running an HP9000/375 with HP-UX 7.0, and have a Laser Jet IID printer with a Postscript Font cartridge. The printer appears to work well when given formatted postscript files, using a very meager printer model. (We are using Framemaker from Frame Technology Corporation, and MatLab from the Math Works Inc. to generate postscript output files). But I have been wondering if there are some converters to allow this Postscript printer to operate as a system printer, as opposed to a dedicated postscript printer only. If there existed some good translaters/converters which would take text input and convert that to a postscript format, this could be integrated nicely into a printer model. I have a rudimentary text to postscript converter (known amazingly as text2ps) which came with HP's Teamwork (CASE) product. This worked ok for the most basic type of a text file, though it did not handle tab characters very well (converted to a single space), and really died on a file with lots of embedded control characters. For instance the output of man contains lots of Bold and underline sequences - this caused lots of problems. Does anyone have any experience with a text to postscript converter ? I have heard a reference to another converter called transcribe, though I don't know where this might have originated from. Any insight would be helpful. Converters going the other direction would be of interest also, so we could take the output from programs generating postscript, and run them through a filter so that the data could be sent to printers which still talk PCL4. Is anyone else out there trying to run with postscript system printers ? Or is anyone currently print spooling to a postscript printer ? How is the conversion accomplished on other machines ? Anyone know of what postscript support MIGHT be coming out with HP-UX 8.0 ? ------------------------------------------------------------------------------- scott pinkerton scpinker@pikes.colorado.edu
paul@hpldola.HP.COM (Paul Bame) (07/16/90)
Text to PS converters are a frequent topic of conversation (and code)
in comp.lang.postscript. There have probably been some posted to
alt.sources and comp.sources.{misc|unix} the last couple of years. I
have one called, I think, 'a2ps' which showed up recently which I've
not unpacked or tested but would be willing to mail to you if you get
stuck.
-Paul "Spice is the Variety of Life"
paul@hpldola.hp.com N0KCL