🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello.  I am looking for software that allows on-screen visual editing of
PostScript code, or a reasonable subset thereof, for use with interactive
editing of a plotting package we are designing that will use a subset of
PostScript as the intermediate file format, with device dependent drivers
supported for H.P. plotters and PostScript printers, of course.

We have been looking at Adobe Illustrator and Aldus Freehand as possible
solutions, with Illustrator's file format seeming very appropriate for
what we'd like to do.  Unfortunately, Illustrator's file format does not
seem to allow us to do arbitrary centering of text not generated by
the Illustrator program.  We'd like to be able to have our plotting package
offer the ability to our users to position text centered around a given
point, but Illustrator does not seem to support PostScript's stringwidth
function, necessary for centering.  Of course, all this is moot if Illustrator
allows nothing more than the basic graphical and state operators, as the
centering code could not use PostScript.  We would probably write a macro
definition in the Prologue for text centering, while having our plotter
handle it reasonably using the built in fonts.

Are there any true PostScript interactive editors out there?

In addition, we would like to get information on X postscript programs,
including editors and simple postscript display programs.

Any recomendations would be welcomed, and I can post a summary to
comp.lang.postscript if there is expressed interest.



Jonathan Abbey
jonabbey@ccwf.cc.utexas.edu       (512) 926-5934
The University of Texas at Austin - CS Undergrad