Re: PostScript to Ascii

[Cameron Simpson]

address@hidden (Jeff Kingston) writes:
| There have been some questions about getting Lout to produce
| Ascii output, to which my response has been that a PostScript
| to Ascii filter would be good if there was such a thing.

A specially hacked PostScripter interpret could possibly do a passable job.

Whenever I want PS->text I usually just want the text and am prepared to lose
a lot of the pretty printing. I have a script called unps being:

        #!/bin/sh
        #
        # Like strings(1) for PostScript.
        #       - Cameron Simpson, 21nov92
        #

        sed -e '/([^()]*)/!d
                s/[^()]*(//
                s/)[^()]*(/\
        /g
                s/)[^()]*$//
                s/\\\([()]\)/\1/g
                /^$/d' ${1+"$@"} | fmt

This produces a surprisingly readable version of most PostScript documents.

Jeff cites address@hidden (Nils-Peter Nelson):
| Wolfgang Denk wins the prize. The way to convert troff to
| ASCII is to use troff. The DWB 3.3/3.4 versions of troff
| include nroff in the same executable, to assure compatible
| behavior.

Yeh, this has long bothered me about Lout; there's no nroff-like version.
I expect it'd be none too easy.

| *All other strategies will fail* (awk, sed, perl,
| etc.) Best they can do is handle obvious things like .sp
| or .P. Only a real [n|t]roff can expand macros, evaluate
| registers, handle conditionals, etc.

Well, you could get at the ditroff output (before the psdit phase) with Perl
etc where there's still a lot of semantic information.

| In DWB 3.4 we have a PostScript-to-ASCII conversion program,
| which works fine on text but doesn't do a lot for pictures.

Likewise the above script.
        - Cameron Simpson
          address@hidden, DoD#743
--
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