Postscript Printer Interface

[Chris Lewis]

In article <88937784D5.52.123460000 at kesrith.uucp> rjbeeth at kesrith.uucp (Rick Beetham) writes:
>A friend of mine is trying to get a postscript printer working with
>his SUN SparcStation. He has got the machine talking to the printer
>and if he puts the printer into Emulation mode (LASERJET, PROPRINTER
>etc) he has no problem getting output.

>However until today when I sat down with him for a bit he could not
>get any TEXT output while in postscript mode.  For a while he
>thought it was his printer so he connected it to another box that
>was using a postscript printer with interleaf and voila it worked!
>Further investigation showed that the other box has a compiled
>printer interface supplied by INTERLEAF. His box has none and so he
>will have to build one.

Yes, Postscript is an entirely different animal than ordinary
printers.  In that you cannot simply ship an ASCII text file to
one and expect it to do something sane.  The Interleaf software
probably has a piece of software built in that automatically
detects whether postscript or plain ascii is being sent to the
printer, and if it's plain ascii, an text2ps converter of some
sort is being invoked.

There are literally hundreds of ascii-2-postscript converters
out in the field.  Before chasing one down, you should consider
what additional things you want to do.  There are simple
converters that just do ascii2ps, and bigger packages that also do
other things, such as permit you to use troff with your postscript
printer.  I'm most familiar with the latter (because I wrote one ;-).
If you want an "all in one" package, you have a couple of choices.
Adobe's Transcript package (commercial) does troff to postscript
conversion, and has a rather fancy ascii2postscript converter (enscript)
as well.  I believe transcript can be setup to automatically call enscript
when you send plain text to the printer.  Psroff 3.0 does the same
sorts of things, and has an automatic ascii2postscript/page flipper/n-upper
utility in it as well as other types of printers (eg: HPLJIII).  tpscript does
similar things, but is limited to ditroff and postscript only.

E-mail me if you want more information on psroff. 

>Also if anyone can point me towards any documentation regarding
>postscript printers in general (ie. commands, interfaces etc) I
>would be most grateful.

Adobe has several books on Postscript: the Red Book (reference),
Blue book (tutorial), and a few other more specialized works.  These
are usually available at technical book stores.  There are several
other good learning books.
-- 
Chris Lewis, Phone: (613) 832-0541, Domain: clewis at ferret.ocunix.on.ca
UUCP: ...!cunews!latour!ecicrl!clewis; Ferret Mailing List:
ferret-request at eci386; Psroff (not Adobe Transcript) enquiries:
psroff-request at eci386 or Canada 416-832-0541.  Psroff 3.0 in c.s.u soon!