Re: Manipulating Postscript File
Re: Manipulating Postscript File
- Subject: Re: Manipulating Postscript File
- From: garbanzito <email@hidden>
- Date: Thu, 24 Jan 2002 13:47:54 -0700
at 2002 01 24, 01:17 -0500, they whom i call email@hidden wrote:
Here's the scenario:
I have a Freehand 9 file which needs to be printed using thousands of
different addresses. Instead of doing all that manually, I want to write a
script to make the substitutions. Here's what I'm hoping I can do:
I'd like to write a postscript file to disk just once, open the .ps file in a
text editor such as BBEdit, do a search and replace with the new address and
save the file under a new name.
there are several alternatives to editing the PostScript.
one is to drop the graphic as an EPS or PDF into a master
page of a layout (i'd use InDesign or QuarkXPress), then use
a utility such as InData (XData for Xpress) to create a
number of pages each with the unchanging graphic plus the
next address. Word can do this too, though it's less precise
and EPS handling may be less satisfactory.
i've used XPress and XData to do exactly the above for a
tabloid size newsletter, and it was unsatisfactory because
the unchanging info was reinterpreted each time by the
printer's PostScript RIP. as a result, each sheet took about
45 seconds instead of 5. (you'd run into this when
substituting text in the PostScript file too.) if your
FreeHand file RIPs very quickly, you might not have a
problem.
an alternative is to use the PostScript "form cache" to
store the unchanging information for each page. i'm only at
the beginning of grappling with this technique, so i won't
attempt to guide you through it, but you can google the
UseNet group comp.lang.postscript, and/or read this
technical paper on how to do it:
<
http://partners.adobe.com/asn/developer/pdfs/tn/5144.pdf>
for the moment, though, i'm resorting to what another person
mentioned -- run the sheet through a second time to print
the address.
--
steve harley email@hidden