Re: import of NCL's EPS output into Openoffice.org

Marcus,

On Apr 16, 2008, at 2:15 AM, Marcus Letzel wrote:

> Dear Fred,
>
> thank you for your quick reply. I posted it to the OOo user forum
> and got promising feedback. I am grateful to the OOo forum user
> acknak who run a series of tests on one of my NCL-produced EPS
> files. According to his results, a merely slight change of the
> internal file format (not to the Postscript level) of NCL's EPS
> output would already suffice to get things going: "to move the
> bounding box statement from the end up to the top of the
> file" [either using epstool or by manual editing]. Please refer to
> http://user.services.openoffice.org/en/forum/viewtopic.php?
> f=7&t=1146&start=10 for full details.
>
> Would you think it is technically possible for the NCL developer
> team to move the bounding box statement according to these
> suggestions, without changing the Postscript level? This would be
> greatly appreciated.

This makes more sense to me, since any Level 3 Postscript interpreter
should be able to handle Level 2, since Level 3 is backward compatible
with Level 2.
>
Putting the bounding box information at the beginning of the file is
something
that we have on our list, but it requires that the information needs
to be gathered
during the file creation and then inserted at the beginning when the
picture
is terminated. Since we create the file during execution instead of
saving it
in a buffer and writing it at the end, we would have to read the file
that has
been created and then re-write it with the bounding box information
inserted.
Since the ps2ps and ps2epsi tools are readily available, we have not
assigned
a high priority to this task. My recommendation would be to write a
normal
Postscript file and then run that through ps2ps. The version of
ps2ps that I
have (which is two years old) also changes the Postscript level from
2 to 3.

If this becomes a big issue for people, then we will reconsider its
priority.

Fred

> Kind regards,
> Marcus
>
>
> Fred Clare wrote:
>> On Apr 14, 2008, at 8:12 AM, Marcus Letzel wrote:
>>> Dear All,
>>>
>>> apparently Openoffice.org is unable to directly import NCL's EPS
>>> output (header starts with "%!PS-Adobe-2.0 EPSF-2.0") whereas it
>>> is able to import the newer EPS format (header starts with "%!PS-
>>> Adobe-3.0 EPSF-3.0"). I refer to "direct import" as "without the
>>> use of an external converter"; I'd be happy to avoid such an
>>> additional postprocessing step.
>>>
>>> Is there a way to tell NCL to produce 3.0 EPS files, or any
>>> chance NCL's EPS output format could be updated in a future NCL
>>> release?
>> What NCL produces is in fact PostScript Level 2. Level 3 should
>> be backward
>> compatible with level 2. Some printers will not yet accept Level
>> 3 and that is why
>> we hesitate to flag our Postscript files at Level 3. It is my
>> opinion that any printer
>> or application that honors Level 3 should accept Level 2.
>> Fred Clare
>
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Received on Wed Apr 16 2008 - 11:10:33 MDT