jonabbey@walt.cc.utexas.edu (Jonathan Abbey) (02/23/90)
Hello. I am looking for software that allows on-screen visual editing of PostScript code, or a reasonable subset thereof, for use with interactive editing of a plotting package we are designing that will use a subset of PostScript as the intermediate file format, with device dependent drivers supported for H.P. plotters and PostScript printers, of course. We have been looking at Adobe Illustrator and Aldus Freehand as possible solutions, with Illustrator's file format seeming very appropriate for what we'd like to do. Unfortunately, Illustrator's file format does not seem to allow us to do arbitrary centering of text not generated by the Illustrator program. We'd like to be able to have our plotting package offer the ability to our users to position text centered around a given point, but Illustrator does not seem to support PostScript's stringwidth function, necessary for centering. Of course, all this is moot if Illustrator allows nothing more than the basic graphical and state operators, as the centering code could not use PostScript. We would probably write a macro definition in the Prologue for text centering, while having our plotter handle it reasonably using the built in fonts. Are there any true PostScript interactive editors out there? In addition, we would like to get information on X postscript programs, including editors and simple postscript display programs. Any recomendations would be welcomed, and I can post a summary to comp.lang.postscript if there is expressed interest. Jonathan Abbey jonabbey@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu (512) 926-5934 The University of Texas at Austin - CS Undergrad