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From: pwebb@yoyodyne.ncsa.uiuc.edu (Peter Webb)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Strange problem with translate
Message-ID: <1991May20.032930.28710@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu>
Date: 20 May 91 03:29:30 GMT
Sender: usenet@ux1.cso.uiuc.edu (News)
Organization: National Center for Supercomputing Applications at Urbana Illinois
Lines: 57

I'm having a curious problem with a postscript program I wrote.  It runs 
correctly and produces the proper output when I execute it in the xps 
interpreter (I downloaded xps from uunet.uu.net), but my printer doesn't seem
to like it.  I include this same postscript file in a .tex file (using the 
\epsffile macro), but while latex and dvips both run without any difficulty, I
get 0 pages of output (not even a blank page).  I assume that this means that
the PostScript file is syntactically incorrect, or generates some sort of
runtime error.  After some hacking, I localize the problem to a single line.
If the line is not commented out, the printer produces nothing.  If it is, the
output is correctly formed, but in the wrong position.  The line is a translate
command!  To wit:

/chernoff
{ chernoffdict begin
% 16 variables left out, to keep example short
  /yorigin exch def
  /xorigin exch def

% Save the graphics state, because we're going to customize it

  gsave

% Move origin - if I comment this line out, it prints.  Otherwise is doesn't.

  xorigin yorigin translate

% Much more code here, including other uses of translate, which work in all
% cases.

  grestore
  end
} def

I've printed (with show, in xps) the values of xorigin and yorigin and they
are both 72 (1 inch).  This subroutine produces a graphic (Chernoff face, 
actually) 1 inch x 1 inch and is called by another routine which tiles an
entire page with these Chernoff faces.  In xps both this subroutine and the
larger program work fine, with the translate line present.  But the printer
won't print a thing.  Here is the latex file I'm using, in case that makes a
difference:

\documentstyle[11pt,epsf]{article}
\textheight=11in
\textwidth=6.5in
\hoffset=-0.75in
\epsfverbosetrue
\begin{document}

\epsffile{chernoff.ps}

\end{document}

I'm mystified by this, and will accept any and all suggestions, hints or
advice.  I'm running on a Sun 3/160, 0S4.0.3, with TeX 2.95 and LaTeX 2.09.
Replies by email please.  

			Peter Webb (pwebb@ncsa.uiuc.edu)