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From: doug@eris.berkeley.edu (Doug Merritt)
Newsgroups: comp.misc
Subject: Re: Looking for a PostScript to ASCII converter
Summary: I've got one.
Message-ID: <1990Jul22.185913.12199@agate.berkeley.edu>
Date: 22 Jul 90 18:59:13 GMT
References: <1990Jul17.044534.23396@ucselx.sdsu.edu>
Sender: usenet@agate.berkeley.edu (USENET Administrator;;;;ZU44)
Organization: University of California, Berkeley
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In article <1990Jul17.044534.23396@ucselx.sdsu.edu> add@sciences.sdsu.edu (James D. Murray) writes:
>
>	After poking around via FTP for a while I haven't been able to
>find a PostScript to ASCII converter.  Not having a PostScript printer
>it would be a nice thing to have.

Coincidentally, I just wrote one.

Reading the responses to this so far, I see the usual "it can't be done"
sort of thinking. Naturally this is true in the general case, but the
point is, what if you just want to read the damn document, and yet have
no Postscript support? In such cases, *anything* is better than nothing.
I've patiently read Postscript documents many times, searching for text
amidst billions and billions of commands by *eyeball*. FOO!

I've looked for such a converter ("text extractor" is probably a better term)
for some years now, including asking around in comp.sources.wanted and
inside sources at Adobe, but no one seems to even understand the utility
of such a beast. I *do* have access to PS printers, so my only motivation
is saving trees...why waste 30 pages of paper if I don't even know what
I'm printing or whether it's important to me? I want *some* idea of what's
in the document first.

So I wrote a very stupid, very naive, quick and dirty little program that
simply searches for the text embedded inside of the rest of the Postscript
program, and prints *that* out. Formatting is nonexistent, output is ugly,
numeric character escapes are minimally and badly handled.

But you can read the text. Let me know if you want the program and I'll
send it on. Improvements to the source very gladly accepted. Approximations
of page coordinate placement commands is the next obvious extension, although
again it's not completely doable (e.g. spiral text).

If you need more sophistication than something on this level, Ghostscript
is probably the best answer.
	Doug
	Doug Merritt		doug@eris.berkeley.edu (ucbvax!eris!doug)
			or	uunet.uu.net!crossck!dougm