🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <25789@netnews.upenn.edu> jeffe@eniac.seas.upenn.edu.UUCP (George J. Jefferson) writes:
> >This must have been asked before ..., but anyone have something
> >to read a PostScript file and generate EPS?  We have a bunch
> 
> This question gets asked alot. - but I havn't seen an answer yet.
> 
> a) cant be done
> b) its a well kept secret
> c) its in the frequent questions thing and i'll never hear the end of it

It can be done in many cases, I believe, using Glenn Reid's "Distill"
program.  Distill sends a PostScript file to a networked LaserWriter,
prepending a procset which intercepts the low-level drawing
operations and sends them back to the Mac.  Its primary purpose is to
"distill" PostScript files which are to be printed frequenty... in
effect expanding all of their customized PostScript operators into
simple move-and-draw commands which will execute quite quickly.

As a pleasant side-effect, Distill also calculates the bounding box for
the image (essential information for placing an EPS file correctly).

As an experiment, I took a working EPS file I had sitting around (our
corporate logo), stripped off the "EPS-1.2" from the %!PS header,
removed the %%Bounding-Box and similar comments, stripped out the Mac
preview information, and then ran the resulting file through Distill.

The resulting file was not EPS-compatible... but only two manual tweaks
were needed to correct the incompatibility:

1) Change the first line to read "%!PS-Adobe-2.0 EPS-1.2".

2) Delete the "%%Bounding-box: (atend)" line from the beginning of the
   file, and replace it with the real "%%Bounding-box" line from the end
   of the file.

With these two changes in place, FrameMaker (on a Sun SparcStation) was
willing to import the file into a document, and printed it correctly.
There was no preview information present on the screen... the anchored
rectangle was blank... but that didn't really present a problem.

The Mac version of Distill is probably available in the /info-mac
archives at SUMEX-AIM.Stanford.Edu.  I imagine that there may be a Unix
version available, but I'm not at all sure where to find it.

I've only tried to distill one file into EPS... but the chances are
reasonably good that it'd work for you.
-- 
Dave Platt                                             VOICE: (415) 493-8805
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