[PLUG] "text2ps.c" - 34 years of recompiling
Perhaps timewasting chatter, but the subject is a Unix/Linux program. So there. I've used Unix/Linux for almost 50 years now ... my first encounter was as a grad student at UC Berkeley, through a friend with "legitimate" access to the machine, and to Berkeley's ARPANET node. As a Tektronix employee, my first "home" Unix system was a Tektronix 6130 running the UTek variant of Unix, around 1985. I organized a dozen Tek engineers to order the major assemblies for that system from engineering stock. We plugged the pieces together, wangled copies of the UTek source code, and compiled our own "distro" - years before Torvalds and Linux. Keith Packard helped us find "new" kernels. Typing madly, filling the process tables with compiles on those very limited machines, then pleasant chatter until completion and reboot. Remember when some brains were faster than many computers? Then text2ps ... The Apple Laserwriter (native language Postscript) also appeared in 1985. The only Postscript drivers I knew about were proprietary ... except for Australian Steven Frede's source code for "text2ps", which he wrote at University of New South Wales, probably around 1982. Just What I Needed to interface between the UTek Unix machine and the Apple Laserwriter. Over the many years since, I've updated and recompiled that text2ps code for various flavors of Unix and Linux. Before today the last recompile was 2006. However, the old C code was not strictly typed. Today (2023 Nov 22 Weds), I tried to recompile the old code for Debian Bookworm ... too many compiler warnings. I am NOT much of a programmer, but I did manage to add enough "int" and "char" and "void" and call prototypes to the program, so now it compiles without complaint. Not bad for a brain still suffering from a 70th birthday in September. I hope C and Debian won't evolve radically much over the next 25 years. I'm not planning on a "dirt nap" until I am older than my 105yo father-in-law, but my MD wife tells me I do not have complete choice in the matter; and even less choice if I hack until 3 in the morning. Spoilsport. The Apple Laserwriter is Long Gone. Today, my main printer is a Postscript hp4100n with multiple input trays (often configured for Letter and A4), also a Brother MFC4400 color printer (also Letter and A4), both with duplexing, and swappable trays for envelopes and legal. I fear that my next MAJOR recompiles will be for CUPS The Next Generation. If CUPSng is manufacturer-driven, HP and Brother may stop writing new drivers for very old printers (with Very Large and Very Cheap Toner Cartridges). Learning how to write laser printer drivers at age 75 will be challenging. Making replacement toner cartridges with desktop additive manufacturing might be even harder. Well, back to "Bringing Up Bookworm". I am moving Many old Linux (mostly CentOS) machines to Debian, and translating ancient MoinMoin websites to MediaWiki. Then, back to my main mission: Changing The World, or at least The World's Poopy Diapers. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com
Re: [PLUG] "text2ps.c" - 34 years of recompiling
I'd like a copy of your text2ps.c There are multiple copies of it floating around as versions of it are included in the tcm utility/utilities and the hp filters that can be installed in Ubuntu. The original program was just put out in the Public Domain and I suspect a lot of people have applied various licenses to it. Text2ps was NOT a "linux" program by any means. It was a C program written back in the days when the idea was to try to write C programs that could be compiled on any operating system. It just so happened that back when it was written nobody was running C on anything over than Unix systems. The author is still going, here's his Linkedin profile: https://www.linkedin.com/in/stephenfrede/?originalSubdomain=au You ought to send him a note and tell him you are still using his program I'd bet he would get a kick out of it. I never went down the Apple printer rathole "back in the day" so never had a Laserwriter or any other Apple printer that would ONLY print Postscript and NOT regular text. But, I used that utility a few times to create test PostScript files which I would send to different printers to test if the Postscript they advertised really worked. That was back in the days you had to buy Postscript chips off Ebay for your HP Laserjects and such. It's also a quick and dirty precursor program for the ps2pdfwr "wrapper" script around Ghostscipt used to create PDF files, sometimes used on websites that pipe Unix man pages through it for download as pdfs. Just for fun I did the following to get the original source: 1) Go to https://www.dosbox.com/ and download and install DOSBox 2) Go to the archive site for the 1992 SImtel archive https://archive.org/details/Simtel20_Sept92 3) Download the simtel archive. Rename the .CDR file to .ISO 4) Mount the Simtel ISO. (I did this under Windows on drive D but you can do it on Linux obviouslt) 5) Mount the Simtel drive (drive D) as D drive on Dosbox 6) Mount some convenient directory as drive C on dosbox In Dosbox: a) copy pkunzip.exe c: b) d:cd MSDOS\ARC_LBR c) copy ARCE40G.ZIP to c: d) cd .. cd POSTSCPT e) copy TEXT2PS.ARC c: f) c: g) pkunzip ARCE40G.IP h) arce40g text2ps.arc Volia - you get text2ps.exe, the C source, and you even get a man page that someone wrote for it. No readme or other information on who compiled it, whether they modified the source to it or what they ran it through to compile it. You can convert the man page/document into PostScript - under DOS- with the command Text2ps text2ps.doc > text2ps.ps I suspect they compiled it with the DJGPP compiler in the MSDOS directory of The Simtel archive. That older version would have produced real real mode programs. Up until Windows 7, that DOS version of text2ps would have worked under Windows command line. The e2ps or a2ps programs purport to do the same thing, incidentally. At work (among lots of other things) I manage a whole mess of printers that churn out around 1.2 million prints a year for the enterprise. I've been on a long term program to try to reduce printing as you might imagine. What most people deal with every 4-5 years I see in some printers every few months. The problem with laserprinters is it's like tires on your car - if you make a LOT of prints on the printer the rubber rollers wear out quickly, you can see the diameter get smaller. If you make very few prints then the rubber rollers eventually age-harden and the paper starts slipping and you get a ton of jams on the printer In the corporate arena we deal with the former and so use printer leasing companies who are constantly servicing the devices in the home area most home users deal with the latter. The printer companies just laugh all the way to the bank. There's no way you can run a printer without it wearing. Paper fibers are abrasive, they actually used to sell paper that was used to polish the ends of fiberoptic fibers before gluing them into connectors until that was made obsolete with the invention of portable fusion splicers. If you stick with buying printers that are designed as workgroup printers for use in the corporation you will be fine, your cost per page will not be significantly high. It’s the printers designed for home users that are the expensive ones. Micro-sized toner cartridges that run out after a ream, chipped so that you have to buy them from the manufacturer. With bigger workgroup printers the aftermarket has solved that. But ultimately the only solution is NOT to print. Ted -Original Message- From: PLUG On Behalf Of Keith Lofstrom Sent: Wednesday, November 22, 2023 7:12 PM To: plug@lists.pdxlinux.org Subject: [PLUG] "text2ps.c" - 34 years of recompiling Perhaps timewasting chatter, but the subject is a Unix/Linux program. So there. I've used Unix/Linux for almost 50 years now ... my first encounter was
