Re: Display Postscript + Framemaker + Redhat + Gnustep ?

[Robert Slover]

Hi Bob,

I am sorry to say that I think you are fishing in the wrong pond ;-)

The GNUstep project at one time intended to use the Display GhostScript 
interpreter for the underlying drawing API, but it never worked out for 
various reasons.  GNUstep has instead opted for a flexible architecture 
with the graphic libraries depending on pluggable "backend" libraries 
to implement common DPS operators.  The biggest thing this costs is the 
inability to use things like the "pswrap" tools to arbitrarily extend 
the server.  Regardless, I don't think this would have ever helped your 
situation.

As you said, the Sun X server contains DPS extensions.  The XFree/X.org 
servers do not.  There would therefore be no way for the libraries on 
the machine hosting FrameMaker to "discover" the DGS libraries -- 
they're stand-alone and use core X protocol only.  The mechanism for 
associating an X windows window context with a PostScript graphic 
context is therefore certainly different.  It's been something like 10 
years since I messed with any of this, but on AIX it only ever worked 
on locally attached displays anyway, IIRC.  There was at one time an 
effort for a "true" DPS extension for Xfree (see dps.sourceforge.net ) 
but it has been abandoned.  That would have been your more promising 
route if it were still available.

Now, to address your problem more directly.  You seem to have already 
identified the issue to be that your EPS images contain no embedded 
preview.  This should be possible to take care of, and -- given that 
you have a large body of work to convert -- should be possible to 
automate.  The last time I looked into a FrameMaker .mif file, embedded 
graphics were stored Base64 encoded (I think) -- this was FM7.  If your 
graphics are already external this should be even easier.  Anyway, with 
the Unix version of Frame you might have access to 'fmbatch'.  If not, 
there are freeware/shareware equivalents.  You can use one of these 
utilities to batch-convert you .fm files to .mif.  A perl script can 
then be used to extract embedded .eps files.  The  extracted and 
external .eps can then be batch-converted to include previews.  Take a 
look at something like 'epstool' for doing this.  I'd recommend TIFF 
previews.  A second perl script can then be used to 'replace' the 
original embedded .eps files inside your .mif files.  Re-open in Frame, 
and things should "just work" -- presuming, of course, that FrameMaker 
falls back to showing the image preview on remote displays without 
PostScript extensions (I do not know this to be true, but I would 
expect it to be).

I'm leaving for a trip in about 5 minutes or I'd provide more detail.  
I've done similar things in the past with inherited FrameMaker 
documents.  Unfortunately, my newest Frame for Unix is 4.0 for Solaris 
(which took lots of shell script hacking to even install on Solaris 7) 
so it would be difficult to put together example scripts.  I don't do 
enough FrameMaker work anymore to justify the upgrade prices.  The 
newest Frame I have for Windows is 5.5, and for Mac, 4.5.  At work we 
use 7.0, but only on Windows (no fmbatch).

Good Luck.

--Robert