Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!me!sun
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
From: sun@me.utoronto.ca (Andy Sun Anu-guest)
Subject: Re: postscript from PS/2 to unix
Message-ID: <1990Mar14.230311.26881@me.toronto.edu>
Organization: University of Toronto, Department of Mechanical Engineering
References: <7986@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu>
Distribution: na
Date: 15 Mar 90 04:03:11 GMT

In article <7986@sdcsvax.UCSD.Edu> mikulska@odin.ucsd.edu (Margaret Mikulska) writes:
>One of our users has the following problem:
>
>He's using a word processor "Nota Bene" from Dragonfly on his PS/2, 
>under MS-DOS. The word processor creates a PostScript file which can
>be saved with the "print-to-disk" command. Since he doesn't have a 
>postscript printer, he transfers the file to a BSD-ish UNIX system
>to print it out on an Apple LaserWriter.
>
>When it turned out that the LaserWriter wouldn't print this file
>from our UNIX system, I had a look at the file - it was obviously
>in some format that no printer (attached to a unix system) would 
>print as is. For starters, it didn't start with "%!"; the whole file, 
>30,000 characters, was one single line (actually, 'wc' reported 
>0 lines); but it did seem to contain a lot of PostScript commands.
>
>I suppose that the file was created in some format suitable to be
>sent from PS/2 directly to the printer (with MS-DOS command print,
>for instance), but not to be ported to a unix or other system. 
>Could somebody more familiar with PS/2, PCs, and word processors
>on PCs tell me what's going on and how do I force the "Nota Bene"
>word processor to produce an honest-to-goodness ps file ?

First, I've never heard of a word processor called Nota Bene. However,
the symptoms that you mentioned (0 line) rings a bell. I had trouble
printing a MacDraft PostScript output file to a laser printer hooked
up to Unix before. I got the same 0 line business. It turned out that
the software didn't generate a new line character at the end of a line.
So when sent to Unix, no ^M at the end to wrap to a new line. Because of
this, you end up having an ultra-long line (imagine ONE line with 30,000
characters in it that even vi or wc fail to recognise it properly. 

What I did to overcome the problem was to write a tiny filter in C that
adds a "\n" whenever it sees a "\0". This should bring the file back
to normal. Last but not least, the word processor itself probably got
it's own laser printer initialization code separately stored on a file
(like PC MS Word that has a file called LASER.INIT that contains all
the PostScript definitions in it). Look and see if you can find such a
file in that Nota Bene thing. If yes, upload it and prepend it to your
PostScript code and shoot it to the laser printer. Otherwise, simply try
adding %!PS to the beginning of your existing PostScript file and see
if anything comes out at all. 

May the FORCE be with you.

>
>Any hint greatly appreciated.
>
>
>Margaret Mikulska
>systems administrator
>
>UC San Diego
>Dept. of ECE
>
>mmikulska@ucsd.edu
>MMIKULSKA@UCSD
>ucsd!mmikulska

Andy
-- 

_______________________________________________________________________________
Andy Sun                        | Internet: sun@me.utoronto.ca
University of Toronto, Canada   | UUCP    : csri.toronto.edu!me.utoronto.ca!sun
Dept. of Mechanical Engineering | BITNET  : sun@me.utoronto.BITNET