Chris writes: | Basically what abcm2ps - and all the related XXXXXXps programs - do is | use ghostscript to produce a postscript file (with suffix .ps) which | unless you have a postscript printer, will not be in a format your | printer can use.
This isn't actually correct. The abc2ps clones all produce postscript directly, without needing help from any other program. Of course, a postscript file itself isn't very useful unless you have another program to display or print it. But you don't need ghostscript for that; any postscript interpreter (for screen or paper) will work. Ghostscript is useful because it's free (as in both speech and beer) and runs on just about any machine. Postscript is, of course, owned by Adobe, and their software also works pretty well. By now, most laser and bubble-jet printers understand postscript, so you probably don't need any special software to get hard copy. Just send the postscript file to the printer. If your printer is less than 5 years old, it will probably work. | This is where gsview comes in - it enables you to | display the postscript file on the screen and print it to your standard | printer (or produce a pdf file, which is then readable with Adobe | Acrobat). All correct. For some reason, some computer systems still don't come with postscript (and pdf) viewers installed. If you don't have one, the gsview (ghostview+ghostscript) package is an easy way to get one. They've made the installation on Windows really slick. I also use ghostscript to convert PS to PDF. | There are two other possibilities which come to mind. If you are typing | in the abc filename after abcm2ps, then it may be that the program is | working and you have a file called out.ps (which is the postscript | output) in the same directory as the program ... Yup. Though this scheme caused enough problems with my web site that I modified my abc2ps clone (jcabc2ps) to act line a normal unix-style "filter" program. It writes the postscript to standard output, so I can use it in a pipe. If I want it written to a file, I have to say ">filename". This makes calling it from scripts a whole lot easier. And it's more concise than the original "-o -O filename". I've collected (or written) a set of little programs that do useful things with abc and postscript, so piplines are something that I use a lot. I don't suppose this would be very interesting to Windows users, and it wouldn't be useful on a Mac unless you have OSX. | The other suggestion is to exit to dos mode (from the "Start" menu) | which will give you much more control - i.e. since you are now in | command line mode, you can simply type abcm2ps and get a list of the | command switches and what they do. You will also get a stream of | information as it is processing a file. I've tried a couple of versions of abc2ps on Windows, and one of the things that tends to get lost is the warning messages. Not that you always care, if it looks ok on your screen. But abc2ps has a number of messages that can explain when things don't come out quite like you expect. I don't know enough about Windows to explain to users how to see those messages. Is there a general way to handle this? To subscribe/unsubscribe, point your browser to: http://www.tullochgorm.com/lists.html
