🚀 go-pugleaf

Request for Discussion:

Here is a problem that I would like to see discussed in
these forums. This thread is, I hope, a continuation of
the related informal BOF at the Summer Usenix.

Users at our site want to produce documents which contain
textual and image fragments from a wide variety of sources.
I have been handling this on an ad-hoc basis, as I am sure
most folks in my position have. 

The merger of postscript code from a wide variety of
sources into a single printable document is complicated by 
two problems:

1) Most tools do not conform to Adobe's Encapsulated 
   Postscript Code and Document Structure conventions.

   Even Adobe's Transcript package does not always do
   so (consider pssun, a pixrect to postscript utility).

2) Most text processors don't know how to exploit these
   conventions. To my knowledge, Scribe is the only
   package that makes use of the %%BoundingBox comment,
   for instance.


Problem 1) admits two solutions. The first: hack on the
tools we have source for, until they do conform.
The second: write a tool to convert a non-conforming
postscript file into a conforming one. The thought of doing this
had scared me a little. However, now that Crispin Goswells'
previewer is around, it is easy to see how to write such a thing.


Problem 2) is almost worse, in that we (our community of
users and text-processing hackers) don't have source
for some of the gadgets: e.g Transcript us <not> PD.
However, some obvious things could be done:

For instance, it should not be beyond us to make TeX and
some version of dvi2ps at least as smart as Scribe.

So: I propose that we talk about this for a while,
with a view to solving this problem (if others
perceive it as a problem...) cooperatively, and in
a general way 

Unless of course, someone has allready done the work....
Where can a ftp it? :-)

Steve Cumming
  


-- 
Steve Cumming		stevec@lccr.cs.sfu.ca		{uunet|...}!ubc-cs!fornax!stevec
School of CS
SFU	Canada		(604)291-4399		        The International Party
								shall be the human race.