!printers or postscript
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Steve Fryatt (216) 2040 posts |
Isn’t that roughly what I have now suggested a couple of times, such as here:
It has the advantage that it could be applied as a manual fix for those not using RISC OS 5, too. |
Colin (478) 2433 posts |
Sorry I thought you were suggesting people should upgrade. |
nemo (145) 2437 posts |
Steve wrote:
Bear in mind that much of that was a reinvention of what I’d already done to the Acorn PDriverPS that we shipped with Vantage (and gave to anyone who asked for it):
I didn’t bother with Type1 fonts because at the resolutions we used hinting made no difference, and we didn’t have a need for UTF support back then either. The only feature that can justify the “PS3” claim is the Artworks-specific graduated fills implemented as shfills (which I’ve done in the past with an in-RIP PostScript shim in the existing PSProlog!). So I don’t think there is very much time to be wasted even if you were trying. |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7904 posts |
Maybe you could give it to ROOL – or do they have to ask for it? :-) |
nemo (145) 2437 posts |
It was an old version (RO3.7 era), but I still have the source somewhere. The ColourTrans CMYK hook was particularly gnarly – there’s no “SetCMYKColour” call in ColourTrans, so the trick was to cache the last 256 calls to CMYKToRGB immediately prior to a SetRGBColour or SelectTable and hence recover the intended CMYKs. We weren’t in a position to create new API back in those days! Such functionality is now moot – DeviceCMYK is not much better than DeviceRGB. What we really need is ICC Profiles. Having implemented v2 and v4 ICC profile support elsewhere, I can confirm that’s quite a bit of work (and much like fonts, much of it involves working around broken files). |
Steve Pampling (1551) 7904 posts |
Sounds like a description of the RO source a few years ago. Maybe your source needs a new place of safety. |
Steve Fryatt (216) 2040 posts |
It seems that back in 2013, I wrote something like the above. I also went on to add something along those lines to PrintPDF, showed it in passing to some WROCC and ROUGOL members, then decided it wasn’t part of PrintPDF’s remit and removed it again… Since then, not much seems to have happened on the PS2 driver front, so I’ve finally got around to dusting the code off and creating a stand-alone utility called – imaginatively – PS2Paper. It’s still a work in progress and the UI and documentation need some fettling, but it does do what it was intended to. An alpha version (or perhaps early beta) can be found on its new web page (or more directly on my test builds page). If I can find time to polish it a bit and include it in my disc image, it might even be available to take away on CD this Saturday in exchange for a fiver for the British Heart Foundation1. As with all of my new stuff, it’s free and Open Source (using the EUPL licence). Constructive feedback welcome. 1 And even if it doesn’t make it on to the CD, there should still be plenty of other useful things on it – such as PrintPDF… |
Chris Hall (132) 3494 posts |
Am I missing something? If I take a Draw file which contains a drawing with paper limits set to A4 landscape and print the draw file using the !Draw application (with the printer set to PS3-PDF – i.e. producing a postscript file using the PS3 printer drivers) and then run an Obey file containing then the result is an A4 landscape PDF file. That is it gets its paper size from !Draw.
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Steve Fryatt (216) 2040 posts |
That will be why the web page and manual have several comments along the lines of “Note that it is not required when using the Level 3 PostScript printer drivers from John Tytgat and Martin Würthner, as these handle paper dimensions themselves.” I also said “PS2 Driver” in the previous post. I’m not sure that I can be any clearer… The problem is more subtle again, as it also appears to work with the Level 2 driver for standard paper sizes where Ghostscript recognises the name that Printers sends it (defined in the default PS snippets, and usually the same as the snippet name). However, you try creating a non-standard size (maybe a 200mm x 200mm square, with a paper name of Square) and PDFing that via the PS2 drivers (again, not PS3, because that will work fine). See what happens then. If you go back and read the entire thread from the start, you’ll realise that this was all about making things work for those who used RISC OS “out of the box” and didn’t wish to pay for the Level 3 drivers for whatever reason. Doing the latter has always been my recommendation; PS2Paper is for those who really don’t want to. I don’t really have the time to go into any more detail today, but I wrote the whole problem up in some detail in Issue 31.10 of The WROCC (January 2014) if you have access to that (perhaps on the Back Catalogue CD). |
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