Xref: utzoo comp.sys.mac:25327 comp.lang.postscript:1434
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From: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts)
Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac,comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: help printing MAC postscript files
Summary: yes, you will need lots of it.
Keywords: postscript, UNIX
Message-ID: <801@sequent.cs.qmc.ac.uk>
Date: 18 Jan 89 15:22:36 GMT
References: <4024@mtuxo.att.com> <219@adobe.COM> <4247@charon.unm.edu>
Reply-To: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk (William Roberts)
Organization: Computer Science Dept, Queen Mary College, University of London, UK.
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There are a lot of problems here, most of which stem from the
"I own the world" attitude expressed in the Macintosh software
and some from the assumption that everyone is connected to
their printers via AppleTalk.

First things to do include

1) strip out the line in the header which mentions setdefaulttimeout
2) remove the line that begins with ok, since this will do
   stupid things to the comms hardware in the LW that you don't want.

A bit harder - perhaps a small C program

3) Convert all characters with bit 7 set to be \213 or whatever
   using the PostSCript excape convention for octal characters

This one is unavoidable

4) Don't generate any output containing bitmaps in binary form

The reason for 4) is that a simple serial line connection
requires embedded control information with the data, whereas an
AppleTalk connection uses a packet protocol and clearly
separates control information from data. Your binary data is
bound to contain junk like ctrl-D and ctrl-T which are ALWAYS,
ALWAYS, ALWAYS treated as control information when talking to a
LaserWRiter through the 25 way connector.  Classic ways to fall
foul of 4) include

 * selecting "Faster Bitmap Printing" on the standard Page Setup
 * using Aldus FreeHand
 * using Pagemaker 3.0 with any driver except Linotronic 100/300

and those are just the ones I've had problems with in the last
week.

Oh yes, you will probably need to stuff the file through fold,
because it contains a few lines of over 2000 characters -
fortunately these are all hex data, so extra linefeeds are
ignored (bitmaps should be done this way).


You will find it useful download the Adobe ehandler.ps routine
before you start, just in case you find other garbage that I've
forgotten. Why are LaserPrep files always written by people
with no love for (or understanding of) PostScript?
-- 

William Roberts         ARPA: liam@cs.qmc.ac.uk  (gw: cs.ucl.edu)
Queen Mary College      UUCP: liam@qmc-cs.UUCP
LONDON, UK              Tel:  01-975 5250