Anybody had luck with psroff/showcase/epsf?

[Rob Warnock]

In article <1991Mar5.180016.2088 at news.larc.nasa.gov>
smd at rehder.larc.nasa.gov (Steve Dahmen) writes:
+---------------
| Can anyone in netland explain why my eps files created with showcase/Move!
| does not work with the PB/PE macro set in psroff????
| 
| They appear (using psview) very much smaller and not indented.  When
| sent to the printer, it does not even appear.  In
| addition, the PB macro seems to cause a breakpage, which makes the
| it virtually useless to us.  I futzed with the PB macro itself
| (lib/psdit.pro) but i can't quite get it to do what i want... but
| the problem seems to be here.
+---------------

I have never used the PB/PE functions directly, so I can't speak to that,
but I have gotten several Showcase drawings to work inside psroff documents
using the ".cf" directive (include a raw PS file) and some "nawk" (awk)
preprocessing (see below). There are a couple of things that caused problems:
Fonts used by Showcase are not always accessible to psroff; psroff has an
inverted Y-origin compared to Showcase; the minimum Showcase linewidth was
often too wide for my drawings; spacing and indenting had to be manual.

These mixed/mode documents worked with both psview and a PostScript printer.

+---------------
| Any ideas/workarounds???
+---------------

The approach Greg Chesson & I took was to massage the Showcase-generated
EPSF with a nawk (SGI-ese for BSD awk) script (named "fixmvps", for weird
historical reasons) to fix up the worst of the problems. It's somewhat
clunky, as we use the ".sy" directive to run the "fixmvps" program from
within the psroff source, and them include the output with ".cf". as noted
above. But it let us build reliable Makefiles which rebuilt the ".ps" files
when the Showcase input files changed (using the "-p" option of Showcase).

For what it's worth ($0.00), the file "sgi.sgi.com:~ftp/pub/show2troff.tar.Z"
contains a short paper "show2troff.ps" and all the input files to build it
(assuming you already have psroff, the "-mm" macros, nawk/BSD_awk, etc.),
which describes what we did. From the paper:

       The current version of "fixmvps" has been used successfully
       with Showcase 1.0, but is not guaranteed to work with
       earlier or later versions, nor with every possible drawing.
       Some drawings have caused either or both psview and the
       LaserWriter to go schizo. It is not clear what the problems
       were.

       The Showcase drawings must be positioned at the bottom edge
       of the drawing page.  You must manually esimate the vertical
       size of the drawing, and set the height parameter to the
       "Mf" macro.  (However, now that Showcase is using real EPSF
       format, a future version of "fixmvps" may be able to extract
       the bounding box information from the EPSF file and use that
       to set the baseline and height.)

       There is no way to communicate the current psroff indenting
       to the drawing.  Indenting or centering must be done by
       moving the figure left or right within the Showcase source
       document.


The usual disclaimers apply: This is strictly something Greg & I did
personally, is not an SGI product or a promise of a product, is totally
unsupported, may not work for you, and may not be there forever [not
even by the time you see this], etc., &c.,...


-Rob

-----
Rob Warnock, MS-1L/515		rpw3 at sgi.com		rpw3 at pei.com
Silicon Graphics, Inc.		(415)335-1673		Protocol Engines, Inc.
2011 N. Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View, CA  94039-7311