Displaying mac postscript stuff

[Mark Callow]

In article <HUNTER.90Mar20152102 at work.nlm.nih.gov>,
hunter at 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 at 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."