On Fri, Apr 21, 2000 at 12:13:00PM +0200, Viktor Rosenfeld wrote: > Hi all, > > I have been playing around with the psutils package and I am really > impressed. What bugs me however, is that psnup will simply scale down > the individual pages and arrange them on another page, including all > margins in the original file. While this looks pretty good, it wastes > space space. So I measured the margins myself and used pstops to > arrange the pages myself. (I also included space for punching holes and > stuff like that.) > > Which leads me this question: How can I measure the margins of a > Postscript file automatically? Is there a tool? Or is there good > documentation of the Postscript file format, so somebody could write a > short perl script? And as a side question: Is it possible to scale a > Postscript file with different values for the x- and the y-ratio? > pstops will only scale x and y with the same value, but using different > values, you could use page space more effeciently. >
I believe postscript file generally do describe a bounding box for the "print area" in addition to a page size. Although, the bounding box is only strictly required for encapsulated postscript (AFAIK). Postscript isn't like a graphic bitmap, it's a printer programming language. The specifications have been published by Adobe and there are one or two tomes on the subject. You might ask experts on a news group like comp.text.ps (?) or something. There are a few experts frequenting comp.text.tex as well. BTW, if you have single pages, you could convert them to eps with a bounding box and then use LaTeX with the graphicx package to create landscaped pages with side by side images that have been scaled. Of course, you'd have to delve into the wonderful world of LaTeX. And, if you went that far -- you might as well create the final product from LaTeX sources to begin with. :) -- ¶ One·should·only·use·the·ASCII·characterset·when·compos » ing·email·messages.
