Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!samsung!uakari.primate.wisc.edu!caesar.cs.montana.edu!ogicse!decwrl!aurora!geof
From: geof@aurora.com (Geoffrey H. Cooper)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: More help with Ultrascript wanted.
Keywords: Ultrascript, QMS
Message-ID: <1990Mar12.223842.8232@aurora.com>
Date: 12 Mar 90 22:38:42 GMT
References: <4896@rouge.usl.edu>
Reply-To: geof@aurora.UUCP (Geoffrey H. Cooper)
Organization: The Aurora Group, Palo Alto, CA
Lines: 45

In article <4896@rouge.usl.edu> cs450125@pc.usl.edu (Sahoo Anirvudha) writes:
>I can not get Ultrascript to work with it.  The program (still.ps) writes the
>optimized output directly to my screen and not to the printer.  The interpreter
>in Ultrascript tells me that it cannot directly access files, so that option

USPC should be able to read or write files directly.  If you type:

    (foo.ps)(w) file

this should open "foo.ps" for write, trashing anything that was in
there previously (be careful how you use this, folks).  The current
directory should default to the current directory when you started the
PS job (from USPRINT or USPC or whatever).

Some pitfalls in this:

- Filenames follow MS-DOS syntax, hence some file names can't be used
(e.g., extensions with >3 characters, more than two "."s and so on).

- Directories can be specified using either slash / or backslash \, as
in any MS-DOS system call.  Note that you must double the backslash to
put it into a PostScript string (hint: use slash):

    (c:\\mydir\\foo.ps)(r)file

- To conditionally open a file, using "stopped" to catch the error
from the "file" operator.

- There is a very severe limit on the number of files that can be
opened at a time.  Typically, this is enough to say "(foo)run" from
executive, but not to have the file "foo" contain another file open.
Hint: the executive itself uses at least one extra file descriptor, so
try running the file in question directly using "print" instead of
executive. 

- Files are always opened in binary mode.  You may see a trailing "^Z"
when reading it.

- As with any MS-DOS program, disk corruption results when the same
file is opened twice simultaneously for reading and writing.

- Don't forget to close the file or you may get nothing.

-- 
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