jeg@srv.PacBell.COM (John Girard) (10/17/89)
I was miffed after finding out that I needed something like Transcript after we purchased our postscript printer. Sun did not tell me, and it was too much hassle to authorize another purchase to follow up the main software outlay. So, I had a friend mail me some samples of Transcript outputs for a series of test files. The postscript programs generated by Transcript for listing text files are quite simple, I got my first practical taste of Postscript by looking at them. It took a day to write and debug a little program I call PSdumb, which will put a postscript shell around any text file destined for my Postscript printer. For those of you who want to get up and running quickly and simply want to use Transcript to send text files to your printer, I can recommend coding your own routine. I set it up as a filter, so it can be activated through a printer alias, but I prefer to call it from a script. The main things to watch out for are: Doing a good job of expanding tabs (it's easier to use a Unix filter, expand, to do that), inserting a backslash before postscript meta characters such as ( , ) and \, and truncating lines too wide for the printer. As with all postscript output, turn off the banner for the printcap alias that is to receive the output. John Girard (not a wizard, but working on it) {att,sun,bellcore,pyramid}pacbell!jeg