🚀 go-pugleaf

About once a week, I've seen someone asking how to get Mac postscript
files to Unix, presumably to include in LaTeX or similar documents.
I've been one of those people, and after 2 months of (intermittent)
effort, the problem basically remains unsolved. Two local Mac and
Postscript gurus (hi, Tara! hi, Rocky!) have also attacked this
problem without success.

As I understand it, there's really no trouble getting the Postscript
files to Unix or including them in a document using dvi2ps. The
problem is in the Mac Postscript header file, which forces the printer
to use absolute addressing. This precludes moving or scaling the
image, so it always takes up an entire page in the document and leaves
the Postscript cursor in an unknown position. The header also has to
be hacked to avoid incompatibility problems with some printers.
(Please follow-up if I'm wrong about this.)

Apple isn't likely to fix the problem with the Postscript header
themselves, even though it would make their product more generally
usable. What, then, would it take to write a translation utility to
convert (at a minimum) Pict and Tiff images directly to
relative-addressed, scalable Postscript? If the LaserWriter driver
can't do the job right, bypass it!

I would certainly pay for such a product, and I'm sure that many
others would too. Especially if the developers were able to guarantee
that Adobe Postscript standards and Mac image file formats would be
scrupulously supported and updates would be regularly available.

Just a thought.

- Steve (masticol@paul.rutgers.edu)