Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!wuarchive!husc6!flare!bochner
From: bochner@flare.harvard.EDU (Harry Bochner)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: PostScript to Encapsulated PostScript?
Message-ID: <3151@husc6.harvard.edu>
Date: 7 Jun 90 21:06:29 GMT
References: <810@ssc.UUCP>
Sender: news@husc6.harvard.edu
Reply-To: bochner@flare.harvard.EDU (Harry Bochner)
Organization: Aiken Computation Laboratory, Harvard University
Lines: 20

My understanding is that a full, general solution is difficult or impossible. 
EPS has to promise not to interfere with what's going on on the rest of the
page: if the PS program you're trying to incorporate doesn't obey this, for
instance if it erases part of the page, you're going to be have to find a
different way to get the same effect, and I don't see a general algorithm for
doing that. The problem gets worse yet if the Postscript code breaks the rules
or plays games with things in the system dicts.

On the other hand, what I've often seen here is reasonably clean PostScript
that already passes as EPS even if it wasn't meant to. The only problem then
is that the programs that want to incorporate it are looking for a BoundingBox
comment, an optional but highly desirable feature of the EPS standard. So in
many cases all we really need is an automatic way to calculate the
BoundingBox. A program called bb.ps that almost works has floating around for
a while, and someone (cosell@bbn.com?) has been working hard just lately on
getting the glitches out of this code. If he succeeds it will be a big help,
so let's all encourage him ...

Harry Bochner
bochner@endor.harvard.edu