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From: pauld@stowe.cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis)
Subject: Re: Converting QMS to Postscript
Message-ID: <1991Apr23.154412.26514@beaver.cs.washington.edu>
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Reply-To: pauld@cs.washington.edu (Paul Barton-Davis)
Organization: Computer Science & Engineering, U. of Washington, Seattle
References: <13283.280dc44b@ecs.umass.edu> <45@ftms.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 23 Apr 91 15:44:12 GMT

In article <45@ftms.UUCP> brown@ftms.UUCP (Vidiot) writes:
>In article <13283.280dc44b@ecs.umass.edu> giovin@ecs.umass.edu writes:
><
><	I was wondering if there might be some sort of program available
><that could convert a QMS laserprinter file to a postscript file.  
><I might soon only have a postscript machine available but have
><programs that generate only in QMS format.
>
>But QMS makes PostScript printers.  I didn't know that QMS had a format of
>their own.  Please tell us the model number of the printer in question so
>that we can give an informative reply.
>-- 
>harvard\
>  ucbvax!uwvax!astroatc!ftms!brown
>rutgers/
>INTERNET: spool.cs.wisc.edu!astroatc!ftms!brown


QMS also make (or made) QUIC printers. The company I used to work for
was faced with the very same problem as part of a large contract we
took on to automate multiple listing books for realtors. They used to
use QMS and we wanted to use PostScript. They didn't want to change
their back-end, so we (or my colleague, Paul) wrote a failry complete
QUIC to PostScript conversion program. I says its complete because it
is actually a compiler, and in our experience, thats the only way to
do the job and be able to guarantee it will work. QUIC allow macro
generation, overlays and other wierd stuff. We used lex and yacc to
process the whole thing: it ran about 15ppm (also doing a lot of
other stuff which consumed about 75% of the CPU - text string lookups,
and other BS). 

If your existing QUIC code is VERY simple, you can get away with a
simple PostScript "prep" file, and a filter, perhaps sed or even awk
based to transform the QUIC macros. But considering that you can
redefine the QUIC "escape code", and that "comments" aren't always
"comments", if your software plays any games with QUIC, you will need
a complete QUIC parser.

I don't think the company is interested in making this software
available, since it is buried in a large system and has a lot of
custom additions that are specific for multiple listing books.

-- 
Paul Barton-Davis			<pauld@cs.washington.edu>
UW Computer Science Lab		``to shatter tradition makes us feel free''