clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis) (02/09/91)
In article <91Feb6.131752est.19475@me.utoronto.ca> sun@me.utoronto.ca (Andy Sun Anu-guest) writes: >clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca (Chris Lewis) writes: >>One of the people using psroff is using X11 pageview to >>view the Postscript that psroff generates, and is encountering >>a problem which someone may be able to solve. Namely, each >>page overlaps rather than replaces the previous page. >>(eg: no erase is occuring of the previous page) >I am using psroff from Abobe Transcript 2.1 and CAT troff and I do >encounter the above problem, sometimes. Not the same psroff. The psroff I'm referring to isn't Adobe's, it's the one I wrote. (No. It wasn't my idea to call my program psroff, but it was posted that way by c.s.u, and nobody knows it by any other name, so it stuck.) I really have to hand it to Sun. The day after I posted the request I got two Sun people e-mailing, asking me to send them the postscript. One of them was dealing with the PageView maintenance people, and the other was one of the (or the one) implementer of Pageview. Plus an ex-Sun employee who implemented part of pageview's predecessor, and who's now in NeXT marketting who suggested that I buy a NeXT ... Sigh... (why me? I don't know - it wasn't me encountering the problem). Within two days they had identified the problems and had proposed some workarounds. The workarounds have been integrated back into psroff, and the result is currently being tested. The nitty gritty: - the prolog that psroff emits contains an invocation of the "reversepath" Postscript operator, which for some reason, that escapes everybody at the moment, wasn't implemented in Pageview. They are working on doing so now. Henry McGilton of Sun spent some time rewriting the part of the prolog that needed the reversepath. For which I thank him - I don't know postscript very well, and I don't have any documentation available either. - The prolog also contains the following sequence: %!PS-.... .... %! .... .... Apparently the second "%!" was fooling the parser. The "!" was removed and the pages came out properly. Sun is fixing their parser so it won't recur. This is pretty damn good service, Sun. Thank you! -- Chris Lewis, Phone: (613) 832-0541, Internet: clewis@ferret.ocunix.on.ca UUCP: uunet!mitel!cunews!latour!ecicrl!clewis; Ferret Mailing List: (ferret-request@eci386); Psroff (not Adobe Transcript) enquiries: psroff-request@eci386, current patchlevel is *7*.