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Date: Sun 10-Oct-1991 11:58:59 From: preston@ll.mit.edu (Steven Preston) Subject: Postscript compatibility under NeXT OS 2.0 I have discovered an apparent incompatibility between postscript generated by OS1.0 and OS2.0. What happens is that many strange glyphs appear. For example, accented 'a's occur where apostrophes should clearly be, and 1/2 and 1/4 marks appear where quotes should be and yen signs appear. Specifically, I tried to pring Buzzings5.ps from the archives and it looks horrible with all those odd characters. It is still readable but it is annoying to try. I also got a bunch of postscript documents from adobe which exhibit the same problem. The funny characters show up in Preview as well as when printed. Does anybody know what is going on? Are there any fixes?
Date: Sun 12-Oct-1991 03:48:44 From: alberto@parsec.uucp (Manuel Alberto Ricart) Subject: Re: Postscript compatibility under NeXT OS 2.0 Steven Preston writes > I have discovered an apparent incompatibility between postscript > generated by OS1.0 and OS2.0. What happens is that many strange > glyphs appear. For example, accented 'a's occur where apostrophes > should clearly be, and 1/2 and 1/4 marks appear where quotes should > be and yen signs appear. The problem has to do not with a PostScript incompatibility, but with a change in the character encoding. I believe NeXT changed their encoding from ISOLatin to NeXTStep. On the way the managed to make some problems for file exchanges between Macs, Suns and everything else. This is real obvious if you get some postscript documents from Adobe. They do their NeXT documentation on FrameMaker SUN, because the .ps files produced there are much smaller than those produced on the NeXT. (Why not just post an RTF and really thin it out - I HATE INFLATED PS DOCUMENTATION, there should be a law prohibiting that kind of file. 300K worth of info grows into MBs of wasted precious diskspace.), but that is another thread... (Anybody got a way of "distilling" NeXT ps output?)
Date: Sun 12-Oct-1991 20:22:17 From: windemut@lisboa.ks.uiuc.edu (Andreas Windemuth) Subject: Re: Postscript compatibility under NeXT OS 2.0 In article <1991Oct12.034844.1379@parsec.uucp> alberto@parsec.uucp (Manuel Alberto Ricart) writes: > Steven Preston writes > > I have discovered an apparent incompatibility between postscript > > generated by OS1.0 and OS2.0. What happens is that many strange > > glyphs appear. For example, accented 'a's occur where apostrophes > > should clearly be, and 1/2 and 1/4 marks appear where quotes should > > be and yen signs appear. [...] > > (Anybody got a way of "distilling" NeXT ps output?) > I found an acceptable solution for printing the old files on the NeXTprinter. Below is a little perl script that converts some of the characters and in addition lets you select specific pages from the manual. This was only tested for the apE documentation, you might have to hack it a bit for other documents. I can't see why it shouldn't work for all Frame output, though. You'll need perl, which you should get anyway. --------------------- 8< ------------------------- 8< --------------- #!/bin/sh # # select pages and translate special characters for # printing out the apE documentation on the NeXTprinter # FIRST=${1?"Usage: $0 [<-p pages>] <ps-files>"} if [ "$1" = "-p" ] ; then PAGES=$2 ; shift ; shift ; fi perl -e ' $first=-100; $last=1000; $pages="'$PAGES'"; $pages=~/^(\d*)(\-(\d*))?$/; $first=$1 if ($1 ne ""); $last=$3 if ($3 ne ""); $print=1; while(<>) { /^%%Page:\s*\".*\"\s*(\d+)\.*$/ && do { if ($1<$first || $1>$last) { $print=0; } else { $print=1; } }; /^%%EndPage:.*$/ && do { $print=1; }; s/\\322/\\252/g; s/\\323/\\272/g; s/\\325/'\''/g; s/\\336/\\256/g; s/\\337/\\257/g; s/\\245/\\267/g; print if $print; }' $* | lpr --------------------- 8< ------------------------- 8< ---------------
Date: Sun 15-Oct-1991 12:06:50 From: preston@ll.mit.edu (Steven Preston) Subject: Re: Postscript compatibility under NeXT OS 2.0 In comp.sys.next.misc article <9110101558.AA03502@LL.MIT.EDU> I wrote: > I have discovered an apparent incompatibility between postscript > generated by OS1.0 and OS2.0. What happens is that many strange > glyphs appear. For example, accented 'a's occur where apostrophes > should clearly be, and 1/2 and 1/4 marks appear where quotes should > be and yen signs appear. > > Specifically, I tried to pring Buzzings5.ps from the archives and it > looks horrible with all those odd characters. It is still readable > but it is annoying to try. > > I also got a bunch of postscript documents from adobe which exhibit > the same problem. The funny characters show up in Preview as well > as when printed. > > Does anybody know what is going on? Are there any fixes? > -- > Steve Preston (preston@ll.mit.edu) I found out eventually what was going on. It is a character encoding change. The postscript files I was trying to print were created by FrameMaker. The prologue defines some font handling procedures. One of these checks to see if the encoding vector of a resident font is equal to StandardEncoding, and if it is, changes the encoding vector for that font. Under NeXT OS2.x, however, the encoding vector for most fonts is NextStepEncoding rather than StandardEncoding (NextStepEncoding is a superset of StandardEncoding, as is mentioned in the release notes for the Appkit). It was a simple matter to have the procedure check for either NextStepEncoding or StandardEncoding, and when I put in that one little change, the documents (Buzz newsletters and the documents from Adobe), print perfectly.
These are the contents of the former NiCE NeXT User Group NeXTSTEP/OpenStep software archive, currently hosted by Marcel Waldvogel and Netfuture.ch.