Transcript alternatives

[John Girard]

I was miffed after finding out that I needed something like Transcript
after we purchased our postscript printer.  Sun did not tell me, and it
was too much hassle to authorize another purchase to follow up the main
software outlay.  So, I had a friend mail me some samples of 
Transcript outputs for a series of test files.  The postscript programs
generated by Transcript for listing text files are quite simple, I got
my first practical taste of Postscript by looking at them.  It took a
day to write and debug a little program I call PSdumb, which will
put a postscript shell around any text file destined for my Postscript
printer.  For those of you who want to get up and running quickly and
simply want to use Transcript to send text files to your printer, I can
recommend coding your own routine.  I set it up as a filter, so it can
be activated through a printer alias, but I prefer to call it from 
a script.  The main things to watch out for are:  Doing a good job of   
expanding tabs (it's easier to use a Unix filter, expand, to do that),
inserting a backslash before postscript meta characters
such as ( , ) and \, and truncating lines too wide for the printer.
As with all postscript output, turn off the banner for the printcap 
alias that is to receive the output.

John Girard (not a wizard, but working on it)
{att,sun,bellcore,pyramid}pacbell!jeg