Xref: princeton comp.lang.postscript:23159 comp.windows.x:44686 comp.windows.x.apps:2694 comp.text:4113 comp.text.frame:5337
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript,comp.windows.x,comp.windows.x.apps,comp.text,comp.text.interleaf,comp.text.frame
Path: princeton!phoenix.Princeton.EDU!dawagner
From: dawagner@phoenix.Princeton.EDU (David A. Wagner)
Subject: Re: viewing postscript files under X windows
Message-ID: <1993May18.031843.26820@Princeton.EDU>
Originator: news@nimaster
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Organization: Princeton University
References: <1sk97rINNptb@polaris.isi.com>
Date: Tue, 18 May 1993 03:18:43 GMT
Lines: 54

In article <1sk97rINNptb@polaris.isi.com> kin@isi.com (Kin Cho) writes:
>
>I can also live with a utility that converts postscript to plain
>text, perferably retaining page counts so that I know how many pages
>the original document contains.
>

	Well, I know of one hack to sort of do this conversion.  First
get ghostscript and check out the gs_2asc.ps file that comes with it.
It prints out some information about where each text string goes on the
page, and maintains page counts.  I've written a little C program to
massage the output of gs -dNODISPLAY gs_2asc.ps somewhat, so that you
can get all the ascii strings in the document.  No guarantees that it
won't break up words/sentences, though - I've used it with varying
degrees of success.  Anyways, try this out, it may do what you want.

/*
 * massager: a filter for use with gs; does crude Postscript->ASCII conversion
 *
 * Usage:
 *	cat file.ps | gs -dNODISPLAY gs_2asc.ps - | massager
 *
 * I print a <Ctrl-L> after each new page.
 *
 * Put the following source into massager.c and compile it:
 */

#include <stdio.h>
#include <string.h>

main()
{
	char	line[1000], *p;

	while (fgets(line, sizeof(line), stdin) != NULL)
		if (line[0] == 'P')
			printf("\f\n");
		else if (line[0] == 'S' && line[1] == ' ') {
			if ((p = strrchr(line, ')')) == NULL)
				continue;
			*p = '\0';
			if ((p = strchr(line, '(')) == NULL)
				continue;
			for (p++; *p; p++)
				if (*p != '\\' || (p[1] != ')' && p[1] != '('))
					putchar(*p);
			putchar('\n');
		}

	return(0);
}

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
David Wagner                                              dawagner@princeton.edu