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  3. November 2006

Re: Distilling postscript files

On Wed, 22 Nov 2006, Dan wrote:


On 11/22/06, James Rich <james@xxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Do you know if your postscript follows the Document Structuring
Convention?  If it does, that should make writing a postprocessor fairly
simple that would do everything you need.  Heck - I could even write it
for you (and my skills aren't that great or anything).



Not a clue.  Do I have to go on the vendor's word, or is there a way to
determine this by looking at the contents of the postscript files?
You can tell by looking at it. The Document Structuring Convention consists of specific contents in the postscript files. If the vendor has followed the guidelines, every postscript document that follows the DSC has the following first line: 

%!PS-Adobe 3.0
Only postscript which follows the DSC is supposed to have that line. Non-DSC conformant documents may have it, but aren't supposed. They may have something else like: 

%!PS
or no comment at all (a comment is a line that begins with a '%'). Below are the first few lines of a postscript document that my company creates. If your postscript file looks similar then things are looking good: 

%!PS-Adobe-3.0
%%Creator: James Rich, Edward A.E. Rich and Associates
%%Title: (Process Certification)
%%Pages: (atend)
%%EndComments

%%BeginProlog

<then a bunch of stuff>

%%EndProlog
The %BeginProlog and %%EndProlog comments are important. But even more important in your case are is the %%Page comment. A DSC postscript file will have the %%Page comment at the beginning of each page. By using these comments you can write a post-processor program which spits out any page you like (and can then convert it to PDF). 

James Rich

It's not the software that's free; it's you.
        - billyskank on Groklaw

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