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From: gordon@island.COM (Gordon Kio)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: How to read psfixed Mathematica-generated postscript files with IslandDraw
Summary: Workaround for Mathematica PS into IslandDraw
Keywords: IslandDraw, postscript, mathematica
Message-ID: <4072@island.COM>
Date: 20 May 91 19:18:19 GMT
Article-I.D.: island.4072
References: <1991May14.221807.20977@engin.umich.edu> <587@appserv.Eng.Sun.COM>
Organization: Island Graphics, Marin County, California
Lines: 54

In article <587@appserv.Eng.Sun.COM> henry@angel.Eng.Sun.COM (Henry McGilton) writes:
>In article <1991May14.221807.20977@engin.umich.edu>, oliveria@caen.engin.umich.edu (ROQUE DONIZETE DE OLIVEIRA) writes:
>
>    *  About a week ago I posted a request about how to make
>    *  IslandDraw 2.1 read postscript files generated by
>    *  Mathematica 1.2 . I got numerous replies, basically all
>Somebody from Island Graphics `ought to be' replying to this.
>However, to the best of my out of date knowledge, IslandDraw
>does NOT contain a PostScript Interpreter.  IslandDraw's

Hi Henry,

Longtime nosee.

Yes, I'm afraid your knowledge *is* out of date. IslandDraw
does contain a PS interpreter in addition to the EPS support you
go on to discuss.

>    *  Unfortunately it seems the Mathematica-generated postscript
>    *  file is very complex (specially the MathScale thing). Thus,
>    *  short of stripping off almost everything in the file, is
>    *  there anything I can do to modify the postscript file to
>    *  something more conforming (and readable by IslandDraw) ?

We looked into this problem and indeed found a problem with this
conversion. We ran some tests on some Mathematica files we generated 
here and found the following workaround. 

To solve your current problem:

Rather than running the conversion from within IslandDraw run the
filter from the command line. The filter is called ps-to-vec and may
be found in $IOFFICE/bin. The command should take the form:

ps-to-vec <infile> > <outfile>.

After running the conversion, edit the outfile. Go to the last line
and add one more close paren. You should now be able to open outfile as
an IslandDraw file.

We are about to release our new version 3.0 with color. In this release
we have rewritten the interpreter in C. It solves this problem
and includes some other fixes. It also addresses a larger domain of
PostScript, is faster, and converts color.

If you have any more problems, drop me and e-mail along with the problem
files and I'll see what we can do.


Gordon Kio

Product Design Manager
Island Graphics
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