Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Path: utzoo!telly!evan
From: evan@telly.on.ca (Evan Leibovitch)
Subject: Re: alternatives to Adobe's Transcript?
Organization: Somewhere just far enough out of Toronto
Date: Mon, 1 Jul 1991 01:14:17 GMT
Message-ID: <286E81F3.2635@telly.on.ca>
References: <khaw.678131541@parcplace.com>

In article <khaw.678131541@parcplace.com> khaw@parcplace.com (Mike Khaw) writes:
>Adobe's current prices for the Transcript package for printing to PS
>printers from Unix are too high for our budget.

>Are there approximately equivalent packages from other sources?
>We're interested primarily in:
>	- printing ordinary Unix text files to PS printers,
>	  with about the same bells and whistles as you would
>	  get with vanilla pr and lpr
>	- spooling PS files to PS printers (i.e., files whose
>	  first bytes are: %!

Almost everything you've described is shipped with the basic UNIX System V
Release 4. Using the 'filter' mechanism of the lp subsystem, you can
print ASCII files, troff and PostScript with a minimum of fuss.
PostScript support is explicitly built in and documented in the generic
Release 4 System Administrator's Guide.

>	- printing Unix man pages (we don't have ditroff, just
>	  plain [nt]roff)

The Release 4 included filters work with ditroff. You might want to
consider something like freely-available psroff, which converts old-troff
output either to ditroff or PS output.

-- 
   Evan Leibovitch, Sound Software, located in beautiful Brampton, Ontario
         evan@telly.on.ca / uunet!attcan!telly!evan / (416) 452-0504
 "MS-DOS 4.0 was a ... learning experience" - Bill Gates, introducing DOS 5
