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From: meuchen@grad2.cis.upenn.edu (Paul Eric Menchen)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Postscript => Raster Image
Summary: PhotoShop should be able to
Message-ID: <27332@netnews.upenn.edu>
Date: 22 Jul 90 06:02:00 GMT
References: <1990Jul11.142258.10596@eplrx7.uucp> <138787@sun.Eng.Sun.COM>
Sender: news@netnews.upenn.edu
Reply-To: meuchen@grad1.cis.upenn.edu (Paul Eric Menchen)
Organization: University of Pennsylvania
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In article <138787@sun.Eng.Sun.COM> falk@peregrine.Eng.Sun.COM (Ed Falk) writes:
>In article <1990Jul11.142258.10596@eplrx7.uucp>, cristy@eplrx7.uucp (John Cristy) writes:
>> 
>>   I need a program that takes Postscript and converts it directly to a
>>   raster image (i.e. TIFF, GIF, etc.).  Please Email recommendations
>>   to cristy@dupont.com.  Thanks muchly in advance.
...
>Postscript is not an image format, or even a metafile format.  It's
>a full programming language that just happens to have an accent on
>graphics.  The way postscript printers work is that they have a
>computer inside that speaks the postscript language.  You send a
>postscript program to the printer and the printer executes that
>program.  If the program tells the printer to print something, a
>picture results.
>
>Consequently, you can't "convert" postscript to a rasterfile.  You have
>to feed the postscript file into a postscript interpreter.  The only
>postscript interpreters I know of are:

Adobe PhotoShop on the Mac has an option to read in a PostScript file
and generate a raster image. I haven't gotten it to work, however. I
always seem to get an error message like "Error parsing PostScript" or
something like that. It would seem to me Adobe should be able to to
parse PostScript, particularly when it came from another Adobe
application, without trouble, but ... if they could do this flawlessly
with PhotoShop they might be hurting themselves.

I've been reading the PhotoShop documentation as I need it and
subsequently haven't read it all. If I find out more about reading in
PostScript I'll post.

Paul Eric Menchen
meuchen@grad1.cis.upenn.edu