Printing postscript files

[pat...@tifrvax.tifr.res.in]

I believe Mathematica generated postscript files need some fixing before
printing. How does one do this ?

Krish

[P.J. Hinton]

On 1 Sep 2000 pat...@tifrvax.tifr.res.in wrote:

> I believe Mathematica generated postscript files need some fixing before
> printing. How does one do this ?

It would help if you could be a little clearer with respect to what your
talking about. What platform are you using, and what are sorts of
PostScript are you generating?

The Mathematica kernel generates an abbreviated form of PostScript for
rendering by the front end when you display graphics. This code itself is
not readable by a generic PostScript interpreter. There are several ways
to convert an individual graphic to full-blown Encapsulated PostScript
code.

1) Select the graphic in the notebook and perform the front end menu
command Edit -> Save Selection As -> EPS.

2) Use the Export function to tell the kernel to save the graphic to a
file.

Export[<file name>, <graphic>, "EPS"]

3) Old timers on UNIX systems will recall the psfix shell script which
could be used to translate Mathematic PostScript. It is still shipped
with Mathematica in the directory SystemFiles/Graphics/SystemResources.

If your graphic uses the Math fonts that acccompany Mathematica, you will
need to either configure your PostScript interpreter to access the fonts:

http://library.wolfram.com/mathgroup/archive/1999/Jul/msg00215.html

The other is to embed the Math fonts in the file itself.

http://library.wolfram.com/mathgroup/archive/1999/Nov/msg00004.html

If you are printing a notebook to a file using a printer driver under
Windows and MacOS, then there shouldn't be anything else you need to do.

Mathematica 3.0 users under X window encountered occasional problems with
malformed PostScript in the header of the file. This can be fixed with
a simple shell filter as explained on this page:

http://support.wolfram.com/Systems/Unix/FE/CleanPS.ja.html

--
P.J. Hinton
User Interface Programmer pa...@wolfram.com
Wolfram Research, Inc.
Disclaimer: Opinions expressed herein are those of the author alone.