Re: [Sheflug] combining two ps or pdf documents

["Chris J" <cej [at] xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>]

And Lo! The Great Prophet Eric E Moore uttered these words of wisdom:
> 
> Except that prologue is just informative, for programs that manipulate
> postscript files.   Now, it's possible your printer would depend on
> such things, but I've yet to actually deal with such a printer.  More
> likely, the PS files wouldn't be leaving the interpreter in the state
> they found it in, which would make the second not work....

There's also the danger that both files might contain an identically named 
function that does different things. I don't know enough about PS to know 
what would happen if there's a namespace clash, but I know most languages 
wibble and tell you to fix it.

One solution that was also posted was to add "save" at the top of each file 
and "restore" at the bottom to save and restore state, which could be 
achived programmatically in ksh/sh/bash with:

	for file in file1.ps file2.ps file3.ps
	do
		echo save
		cat $file
		echo restore
	done > output.ps

Apparently though this can involve more processing and memory than a proper 
merge, and ghostscript apparently doesn't like it one jot[1][2].

Chris...
[1] http://groups.google.co.uk/groups?hl=la&lr=&ie=UTF-8&selm=4408%40ftms.UUCP
[2] or at least didn't - that article is dated 1995, so it may have marched 
on a little since

-- 
\ Chris Johnson           \ NP: Inkubus Sukkubus - The Beast With Two Backs
 \ cej [at] nightwolf.org.uk    ~-----, 
  \ http://cej.nightwolf.org.uk/  ~-----------------------------------, 
   \ Redclaw chat - http://redclaw.org.uk - telnet redclaw.org.uk 2000 \____



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