hsc@mtund.ATT.COM (Harvey Cohen) (12/01/88)
I recently posted a request for help in clipping white space from around a Postscript picture to be embedded in a troff document. I've learned two things since then (with the kind help of Jeff Brosemer): 1) The troff software I use (written by Drechsler and Wilks) looks for the "%%BoundingBox: " comment to determine the actual size of the picture, excluding white space. The size is expressed as the coordinates of the lower-left and upper-right corners of box bounding the picture, in units of 1/72 inch, with the lower-left corner of the page as origin. E.g., a 2-inch square picture centered in an 8.5 x 11 page should have: %%BoundingBox: 234 324 378 468 Some postscript drivers do a good job on the BoundingBox; others don't, and some hand-editing of the output file is beneficial. 2) Micrografx Designer does not put the BoundingBox comment in its Postscript output. However, it *does* put the BoundingBox comment in its *Encapsulated* Postscript output, which is available only in the latest release (Designer 1.3). So far, I have observed it to do an excellent job of calculating the BoundingBox. There's just one problem - It doesn't put a space after the colon. This keeps the troff software I use from finding the BoundingBox. The solution is simply to edit the EPS output from Designer to add a space after the colon. I would not be surprised to find the same problem (with the same solution) for the "%%Page: " and "%%EndPage: " lines, but I have not observed it because I do not normally do multipage drawings on Designer. -- Harvey S. Cohen, AT&T Bell Labs, Lincroft, NJ, mtund!hsc, (201)576-3302