lick@alpo.ucsb.edu (Dr. Wilbert Lick;961-4295;2335 Engr II;964-2088;;;;8lick@alpo.ucsb.edu (Dr. Wilbert Lick;961-4295;2335 Engr II;964-2088;;;;8lick@alpo.ucsb.edu (Dr. Wilbert Lick;961-4295;2335 Engr II;964-2088;;;;8lick@alpo.ucsb.edu (Dr. Wilbert Lick;96) (03/22/90)
I have a lot of questions to ask, and I expect that most of them will have a lot of answers from many people all over the place, so I am asking that you please send your answers to me via e-mail to jim@piggy.ucsb.edu in an effort to cut down on repetitve postings on this group. I will summarize responses as soon as I have some good answers. We used to have a Unix system with Adobe's Transcript package on it, but it died last week, and will probably not recover. Our support group apparently no longer supports Transcript directly, so we are out of luck using it unless we are able to scrape together a hefty sum of money to buy it ourselves. We now have our Laser Writer Plus hooked up to a Sun Sparcstation 1. We have been able to patch together a few public domain packages to cover some of what Transcript had previously provided us. However, we still have some holes to fill. 1) We desperately need a Tektronix 4014 -> PostScript filter. This was provided by the ps4014 Transcript program. If we can get this we could hobble along with what we have. 2) We need a better plot -> PostScript filter. We have something called plot2ps, but it is not very good. We need something similiar to Transcript's psplot. 3) We need a good way to print out troff files, and a way to use multiple fonts. We have something called psroff, but it appears to be an old version, and doesn't work very well. 4) We need something like Transcript's pscomm, to handle error messages and flow control. We currently have /etc/printcap set up to just send raw files out the serial port, and throw a ^D at the end. This has several problems. If the printer is off, or disconnected, the serial port's buffer overflows and causes the OS to choke. Errors are not caught, and if a job is removed from the queue while it is printing, the printer gets very confused, and often will choke on the next print job. 5) We need a better text -> PostScript filter. We have text2ps which was posted here recently, but it has a few problems. One of the major ones is that it doesn't realize that most Laser printers have a margin around the edge where they can't print, so that text printed in landscape mode gets chopped off around the edges. Also if an error message comes up while it is printing (for instance if the tray runs out of paper), the error message will be printed on the page wherever the printer happened to be when the error occurred. If possible, please point me in the direction of an anonymous ftp archive. Is there any ftp server that has a large selection of good postscript routines? I would also appreciate learning of any other programs or filters out there that you would consider either essential or very useful. Thanks in advance for any help I receive! Jim Lick jim@piggy.ucsb.edu