🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <Jan.15.12.57.31.1989.25598@paul.rutgers.edu> masticol@paul.rutgers.edu (Steve Masticola) writes:
>
>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.
>
>[...]  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.



Having hacked many a laser-prep for LaTeX inclusion, I heartily agree.
A Postscript (as opposed to a Laserwriter) driver would be a welcome
product.  This would have to be a completely new driver --- a hacked
laser-prep header (MD) would only work for one version of the laserwriter
driver.  The changes from version to version are usually very extensive.

One of the big problems is that Apple uses a superset of Postscript.
They use a lightly-documented feature of the laserwriter (I assume added
just for Apple) called eexec.  "eexec" downloads encripted 68000 object
code that can do anything.  In particular, apple uses eexec to define
two new commands "stretch" and "smooth4" that do bitmap stretching and
smoothing.  Personally I would be happy with a driver that didn't support
bitmap stretching and smoothing, sub-point text justification, or font
substitution.

Consider this a vote for a simple "True-Postscript" driver for Macintosh.

Chris Uhlik      uhlik@sun-valley.stanford.edu   (415)328-6438