grantw@zooid.Eng.Sun.COM (Grant Williamson) (06/29/90)
I want to take an arbitary number of PostScript files and concatenate
them together for subsequent processing by various PostScript programs.
Based on a few tests and my *very* limited knowledge of PostScript,
I've reached the conclusion that merely concatenating the two (or more)
files together without some sort of re-structuring is *not* acceptable.
The (multi-part) question is:
1. Is this even a feasible concept (concatenation of PostScript files)?
2. If so, I would imagine that a filter should be written which
would restructure the concatenated contents into something that
looks like a single cohesive document. Do you think this filter
would be difficult to write in a robust fashion (so that it
won't fail for non-trivial PostScript files)?
3. If a generalized filter isn't an option, is there perhaps
some way to reset all PostScript parameters at the beginning
of each new document appearing in the concatenated file?
If you can give me any pointers, hints, references, code ;^), please
do so by sending e-mail to grantw@sun.com.
Your help is greatly appreciated!
--
-Grantzben@umd5.umd.edu (Ben Cranston) (06/30/90)
In article <138052@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> grantw@zooid.Eng.Sun.COM (Grant Williamson) writes: > I want to take an arbitary number of PostScript files and concatenate > them together for subsequent processing by various PostScript programs. Yes, I know the guy explicitly asked for email, and in fact I typed this entire message in as an email message, but as I was about to commit it I thought that the concept of PostScript save is something that everybody could profit from. So, I killed the mailer and am posting it instead. Mea culpa. Here's something I wrote that handles a real worst case scenario, multiple Macintosh command-f files! I did multiple technical notes with it. #! /bin/sh # output file both sides # m option for macintosh files { case "$1" in -m|-M) cat $HOME/etc/ratpro70 ; shift ;; *) echo %!PS-Adobe ;; esac echo statusdict begin true setduplexmode end for file in $* do echo save mark cat $file echo cleartomark restore statusdict begin newsheet end done } | qpr -q lps20 You can ignore the setduplexmode stuff, that was to print on both sides of the paper. The important stuff is the stuff in the do loop. It saves the state before each file and puts a mark on the stack. After the file it clears the stack back to that mark and does a restore of the save object. The statusdict begin newsheet end gets each new file on a new physical piece of paper, again, this is the bothsides stuff. A malevolent file can still kill this by clearing away the mark and the stacked save object, but Mac files don't do this. They do leave detrius on the stack, though, hence the mark/cleartomark stuff. If you are really paranoid you could save the save object under some name and get it back, with something like this: /bandersnitch save def <.include file 1 here.> bandersnitch restore /bandersnitch save def <.include file 2 here.> bandersnitch restore and so on. Then only if the included files blow away the bandersnitch variable would it break. You could probably protect against even that by creating a directory and putting it on the directory stack before including the file. Then any use of the name would occur in that directory, and you could pop it off when you get back from the include file... -- Ben Cranston <zben@umd2.umd.edu> Warm and Fuzzy Networking Group, Egregious State University My cat is named "Perpetually Hungry Autonomous Carbon Unit"; I call him "Sam".