stevec@fornax.UUCP (Steve Cumming) (12/14/88)
Request for Discussion:
Here is a problem that I would like to see discussed in
these forums. This thread is, I hope, a continuation of
the related informal BOF at the Summer Usenix.
Users at our site want to produce documents which contain
textual and image fragments from a wide variety of sources.
I have been handling this on an ad-hoc basis, as I am sure
most folks in my position have.
The merger of postscript code from a wide variety of
sources into a single printable document is complicated by
two problems:
1) Most tools do not conform to Adobe's Encapsulated
Postscript Code and Document Structure conventions.
Even Adobe's Transcript package does not always do
so (consider pssun, a pixrect to postscript utility).
2) Most text processors don't know how to exploit these
conventions. To my knowledge, Scribe is the only
package that makes use of the %%BoundingBox comment,
for instance.
Problem 1) admits two solutions. The first: hack on the
tools we have source for, until they do conform.
The second: write a tool to convert a non-conforming
postscript file into a conforming one. The thought of doing this
had scared me a little. However, now that Crispin Goswells'
previewer is around, it is easy to see how to write such a thing.
Problem 2) is almost worse, in that we (our community of
users and text-processing hackers) don't have source
for some of the gadgets: e.g Transcript us <not> PD.
However, some obvious things could be done:
For instance, it should not be beyond us to make TeX and
some version of dvi2ps at least as smart as Scribe.
So: I propose that we talk about this for a while,
with a view to solving this problem (if others
perceive it as a problem...) cooperatively, and in
a general way
Unless of course, someone has allready done the work....
Where can a ftp it? :-)
Steve Cumming
--
Steve Cumming stevec@lccr.cs.sfu.ca {uunet|...}!ubc-cs!fornax!stevec
School of CS
SFU Canada (604)291-4399 The International Party
shall be the human race.