On 2010-02-19, at 11:29 AM, t wrote:

> On Fri, Feb 19, 2010 at 3:44 PM, Christiaan Hofman <[email protected]> wrote:
>> 
>> On Feb 19, 2010, at 15:28, Marc H. Scholl wrote:
>> 
>>> 
>>> On 19.02.2010, at 14:37h, t wrote (with possible deletions):
>>> 
>>>> [...]
>>> 
>>>> Yes- I suspect it wont do any good either. You might be better filing
>>>> a bug report against emacs- I would guess the issue is something to do
>>>> with fonts where the apple system is a bit different to ghostscript-
>>>> perhaps the emacs guys can easily fix it to work on osx?
>>>> 
>>>> regards
>>> 
>>> 
>>> ... actually a very good comment, especially, since the original post was 
>>> talking about *Aquamacs*, a Mac-only version of emacs. It should be a peace 
>>> of cake for them to make the ps-print suitable for preview/skim.
>>> 
>>>       --Marc
>> 
>> Aquamacs already does this. In fact, it does not expose the PS print 
>> functions, but instead a print function that sends PDF  for printing to 
>> Preview.
>> 
>> BTW, I cannot reproduce it. When I try something like ps-spool-buffer, I 
>> have no problems with the generated PS. But perhaps when you're using 
>> non-standard fonts, I can imagine that this indeed is a problem. When fonts 
>> are not included in the PS (and it seems that the ps-print-... and 
>> ps-spool-... functions indeed don't include them), then the PS is not 
>> guaranteed to be readable, and I can imagine that Apple's CoreGraphics 
>> conversion API (which is what Skim and almost certainly Preview and the 
>> pstopdf CLT use) cannot find some non-standard fonts. I don't think that 
>> would qualify of a bug of either tools, but I would rather blame the PS 
>> generator than Apple. I don't know if fonts is the problem, but I cannot 
>> imagine it's in the PS that's used itself, because the PS syntax is pretty 
>> much fixed (unlike PDF, which keeps being messed with by Adobe, and is much 
>> more messy than PS as a result).
>> 
>> Christiaan
>> 
>> 
> 
> I can reproduce the problem here (osx 10.6) using whatever the default
> font settings are (since I haven't changed them)- if I use
> emacs/aquamacs ps-spool-* functions and apple's pstopdf then I get a
> pdf with no (visible) text. Its not clear (to me) who's at fault- but
> the likelihood of apple patching their pstopdf is v.v.small- besides
> there are lots of tools which do the same job (like enscript) and work
> perfectly well on osx- so your best bet is to ask the emacs guys to
> fix their psprint code to work with osx.
> 
> By the way, Aquamacs has another way to print 'M-x aquamacs-print'
> which uses another method and brings up the apple print dialog so you
> can 'Save to PDF'. Use this, or ghostscript to produce your pdf's if
> the other ways don't work.
> 
> regards,
> 


Perhaps I should explain what I set out to do.

I still occasionally print out source code. I know this identifies me as an old 
timer, since hardly any of the programmers I know ever look at hardcopy. 
However, on rare occasion I still do so. 

And, I liked the headers/footers that the emacs ps-* stuff did. The aquamacs 
print does not provide such a thing, as far as I know.

Thus, I tried ps-* + Skim. (I really like Skim and always use it to look at pdf 
in preference to Preview. I always use it with TeX.)

This morning I set out to do a standalone program that uses Apple's 
CGPSConverter calls to see whether the callbacks would report any problems with 
postscript created by aquamacs. So far I have not succeeded; I have not done 
any objc or c programming in many moons and seem to have lost the knack. It may 
not report anything interesting anyway. I'll plug away and see if I can get it 
to work.

I appreciate that there are other ways to skin this cat, e.g. with ghostscript. 
However, I think there is something fundamentally interesting here, for me at 
least. As I said in an earlier post on this thread, if Apple s/w is broken, 
that's interesting. If aquamacs/emacs is producing bad postscript, that's 
interesting too, although not to the Skim crowd probably. 

More important, from a Skim point of view, is it ok that the Apple's postscript 
conversion api/utility *silently* produces a file with no text? If the 
postscript is bad, should there not be some error reporting of this?

- Phil -


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