hunter@work.nlm.nih.gov (Larry Hunter) (03/21/90)
I'd like to be able to take files (images and formated text) from my
Mac to the SGI. I thought the easiest way to do this would be to
create postscript files on the Mac (printing to a file with command-F
during print), ftp 'em to the SGI and then do "psh <filename>."
Everything looks fine, but nothing happens. I tried "say -p
<filename>" also with no luck. I would appreciate any help anyone
could offer before I spend a lot more time on this.
I looked at the postscript files, and have a couple of ideas: there
are font downloading commands that look like
%%BeginFont: Helvetica-Bold
%!PS-AdobeFont-1.0: Helvetica-Bold 001.004
%%CreationDate: Wed Sep 27 22:11:11 1989
%%BeginFont: Helvetica-Bold
%!PS-AdobeFont-1.0: Helvetica-Bold 001.004
%%CreationDate: Wed Sep 27 22:11:11 1989
...
eventually followed by lots of binary (?) data. Could that be the problem?
There's also a document setup section right after the prolog that may
be printer specific:
%%EndProlog
%%BeginDocumentSetup
md begin
T T 0 0 730 552 -31 -30 761 582 100 72 72 1 F F F F T T T F psu
(Larry Hunter; document: Paper)jn
0 mf
od
%%EndDocumentSetup
%%Page: ? 1
I'm fairly new to postscript (and unconvinced that humans should ever
have to look at the stuff), and I sure could use some help...
Thanks!
Larry Hunter
National Library of Medicine
hunter@nlm.nih.gov
(301) 496-9300
(301) 496-0673 (fax)blbates@aero4.larc.nasa.gov ("Brent L. Bates AAD/TAB MS294 x42854") (03/21/90)
I have come to the conclution that the SGI (and for that matter SUN's too) psview is brain dead. psview seems to work on only EXTREMELY simple PostScript files. I have taken TeX files, TeX'ed them, then dvi2ps'ed them and nothing happens with psview. I have taken some PostScript files that I created from scratch and nothing happens. VERY simple files have worked or almost worked. The PostScript "image" command doesn't work correctly. psview ignores the "image" transformation matrix completly. All of the files I have tried print out fine on our Apple laser printer and our NEC 890 laser printer. I would say give up on trying to use psview, at least until someone makes one that works. -- Brent L. Bates NASA-Langley Research Center M.S. 361 Hampton, Virginia 23665-5225 (804) 864-2854 E-mail: blbates@aero4.larc.nasa.gov or blbates@aero2.larc.nasa.gov
msc@ramoth.esd.sgi.com (Mark Callow) (03/23/90)
In article <HUNTER.90Mar20152102@work.nlm.nih.gov>, hunter@work.nlm.nih.gov (Larry Hunter) writes: > > I'd like to be able to take files (images and formated text) from my > Mac to the SGI. I thought the easiest way to do this would be to > create postscript files on the Mac (printing to a file with command-F > during print), ftp 'em to the SGI and then do "psh <filename>." > Everything looks fine, but nothing happens. I tried "say -p > <filename>" also with no luck. I would appreciate any help anyone > could offer before I spend a lot more time on this. > Psh draws on the background so you have to get rid of most of your windows to see anything. Use psview(1) for previewing PostScript like this. There is a much improved psview and news_server (where the PostScript interpreter is) coming in the next release. When bringing files from over from the MAC you need the laserprep file. I think one of the magic command- sequences saves the laserprep file in the file it is making. The most likely source of problems are your PostScript trying to use laserwriter specific operators such as "letter" and "manualfeed" or missing fonts. If the code uses definefont to make fonts it will work. Look in /usr/adm/SYSLOG for the errors from your PostScript file. Adobe posted a prologue file to the net some time ago that can be used to keep laserwriter specific code happy. Yes, even Display PostScript has this problem. I notice that Appendix D has been deleted from recent editions of the red book. This appendix dealt with the laserwriter. Caveats about the PostScript in NeWS: 1. NeWS doesn't support the half-tone screening operators (setscreen, settransfer) 2. NeWS doesn't like very small numbers (e.g. 0.000002). They tend to become zero. 3. NeWS only returns the character bounding box in response to charpath, not a path describing the character shape. (Possibly this is fixed in NeWS 2.0 -- the X11/NeWS merge) 4. Our present release of 4Sight (NeWS) 1.4x has several serious bugs (all fixed in the next release) that affect previewing of PostScript including: the bind operator is broken which affects a lot of Adobe generated PostScript (e.g. from Adobe Illustrator) because Adobe makes heavy use of bind. reencoding fonts with more than 256 glyphs can cause the server to crash. the PostScript sequence typically used to reencode fonts exercises a bug that changes the transformation matrix such that subsequent rendering falls off the page. Caveats about psview: 5. The current version of psview caches the current page in the server which causes Adobe's standard use of the currentfile operator to fail. 6. The current version of psview incorrectly resets StandardEncoding to a weird dictionary. It's supposed to be an array. In short, there is an embarassingly large class of PostScript which you cannot presently preview on our systems. I have made big improvements in the next release. -- From the TARDIS of Mark Callow msc@ramoth.sgi.com, ...{ames,decwrl}!sgi!msc "There is much virtue in a window. It is to a human being as a frame is to a painting, as a proscenium to a play. It strongly defines its content."