Re: [Groff] Using pic/groff/gs to produce gif/jpeg

[Larry Kollar]

David Griffiths wrote:

> Hi, I'm new to pic/groff and I've been having some problems  
> producing either gif or jpeg images using them. ....
>
> Anyway I started out following some instructions here: http:// 
> www.spinellis.gr/sw/umlgraph/doc/faq.html#antialias but the  
> resulting command was very slow. Here are my findings as pasted  
> from my internal blog. I wondered if they made sense or if I'm  
> missing some simpler approach to the whole thing (btw I need the gs  
> stage because using -T gif in groff produces very poor text, no  
> antialiasing).

Yes, there's a far simpler approach. Use this command:

        groff -p -Thtml test > test.html

which is equivalent to:

        pic test | groff -Thtml > test.html

This renders your text as HTML, which probably won't do what you  
really want with the text unless you're using -man or -ms macros, but  
will render each picture, table, and equation as a PNG file. If all  
you need is the rasterized pictures, you're golden. :-)

Actually, now that I think about it, you probably need to use the -ms  
macros to get the pics to render properly. Either that, or edit your  
input file thus:

        .PS
        .HTML-IMAGE
        # pic commands here
        .HTML-IMAGE-END
        .PE

> From my blog:
>
>  I missed the hint in the FAQ and after a bit of messing around got  
> the following command to work:
>
> pic test | groff | ps2eps | gs -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=1000 -q -r360 - 
> dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pnm -sOutputFile=- - -c quit | pnmcrop | pnmscale  
> 0.5 | ppmtogif > test.gif
>
> I had to add the -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=1000 option because without  
> that it chopped off the top of the picture.

Ah, looking at the referenced FAQ, it appears that your groff uses A4  
paper size by default. To fix that temporarily, change "groff" in the  
above pipeline to "groff -P-pletter" -- you can also change it  
permanently by editing the .../groff/<version>/font/devps/DESC file  
to contain the line "papersize letter" and removing any other  
"papersize" line in the file.

Hope that helps!

--
Larry Kollar     k  o  l  l  a  r  @  a  l  l  t  e  l  .  n  e  t
Unix Text Processing: "UTP Revival"
http://unixtext.org/