Subject: Re: CCL:postscript editor

From: "Wolf-Dietrich Ihlenfeldt" <[email-masked]>
Date: Tue, 10 Feb 1998 01:56:21 +0100

On Feb 9, 18:34, Dr. Bruno Manunza wrote:
> Subject: CCL:postscript editor
>
> On Mon, 9 Feb 1998, Shin-Inn Chen wrote:
>
> > dear netters:
> >        i need a program that can read the postscript file and modify the
> > figure. does any one know where can i download the program like this?
> > any suggestion will be appreciated.
> >
> Dear Shin,
> 	on UNIX/LINUX, Win and Mac you may use ImageMagick which do exactly
> what you need.
>
> have a look at it at:
> http://www.wizards.dupont.com/cristy/ImageMagick.html
>
> Bye
> Bruno

(plus several other helpful messages not included here).

I have a suspicion that the original request may have been
misunderstood. Until now, all postings referred to programs
which can read an EPS file and export it as some kind of
bitmap and support the addition of
annotations and other image manipulations on the
bitmap. A good selection of these programs has been presented in the
previous posts.

However, EDITING a PostScript file is another problem. For example,
if you want do delete a line which crosses other elements this will
be an awkward procedure in a typical image processing program, and in
any case you will lose the advantage of the original file format, for
example scalability without artefacts etc.

There are programs available which contain an embedded
PostScript interpreter and allow direct manipulation of the
PostScript strokes and other basic elements. Unfortunately,
these programs tend to be rather expensive.

The freeware program 'pstoedit' (part of the X11R6 distribution, also
available from numerous ftp repositories, check with archie,
most current version appears to be 2.50) will read a PostScript
or PDF file and output its contents in various vector formats
(mif, fig, cgm, wmf, gnuplot, dxf, etc.) which can be
loaded into a vector drawing program and manipulated in a
more comfortable way than with bitmap image manipulation programs.
Note however that this program only processes lines and text,
embedded images etc. are lost in the conversion process. You also need
a PostScript interpreter program, for example ghostscript.

Of course, you can also use your standard text editor to edit the
original file directly. PostScript is plain Ascii and inherently just another
programming language. Direct editing is not so difficult as it may
sound if you simply remove items -
just a few hours ago I edited an MSI Cerius II output file to get rid of
some annoying logos. All you need is a PostScript language documentation
manual and a PostScript display program to avoid wasting paper
during the editing steps.

--
Dr. Wolf-D. Ihlenfeldt
Computer Chemistry Center, University of Erlangen-Nuernberg
Naegelsbachstrasse 25, D-91052 Erlangen (Germany)
Tel (+49)-(0)9131-85-6579  Fax (+49)-(0)9131-85-6566