postscript purgatory & the callsheet - (long and twisty with links)

[Lennart Sorensen]

On Sun, Sep 26, 2004 at 11:17:22PM -0400, David J Patrick wrote:
> In my ongoing personal quest to tame the organizational tiger, I am
> attempting to re-create that indespensible film production tool: the
> callsheet. For at least a decade, I have wished I could wake up to a
> freshly printed and personal callsheet, that's totaly script driven, and
> I /almost/ have it working ! I'm planning to sourceforge it as soon as
> it's near useable) and have registered callsheet.ca just in hopes of
> expanding to a comprehensive production service site (someday, but
> that's another story).
> 	The hardware: a PIII500 w. 512m RAM and an HP2100M laserjet (that I
> just got) via parallel.
> 	The software: Mandrake 10.0, bash, scat, a perl weather script and
> another for sunrise/set. 
> My PIM data is palm pilot centric, using pilot-link, jpilot, and some
> handy pilot CLI tools; pclt. 
> HTML is the intermediate browsable format and postscript, mighty
> postscript is to be the engine that brings this thing to the page,
> thanks to txt2html and html2ps and psutils. 
> 	The challenges; to cull data from the pilot and the web (working, could
> improve) transform that data into an html page with navigation to other
> pages and then to ps for print (working, could use a lot of
> improvements) and what should be the easy part; printing the the
> resulting callsheet.ps 2up, manualy duplexed (flipped over) has proven
> elusive ! I

I thought scripting document layout and such was the job for tex/LaTeX.
Makes very nice ps output too.
> 
> Q#1
> if a2ps is the heart of the psutils, shouldn't my a2ps-site.cgf have
> something about the HP2100M laserjet, rather than "unknown printer" ?
> where would I get the right printer config file/ data ?

I have never needed to change the a2ps config, as long as the systemwide
paper size and such is set to the right defaults.

> Q#2
> if I want to print out in a boolet form, 2up, I think I should use the
> psutils but in what order ?
> a2ps filename.ps | psnup -2up | psbook -s4 | psmandup _ lpr ???
> or what ? I can't seem to find a working sequence.  

I thought by default a2ps printed it directly, it doesn't send to
stdout.  It also has support for n-up and duplex and all right in it, so
you probably don't need any of those other tools.  If on the other hand
you do want to use those other tools, you have to convince a2ps to send
to stdout rather than default printer.

> Q#3
> I am starting to /get/ the concept of virtual printers, and would love
> to just fire ant ps document at "printer.callsheet" or whatever. Is
> there an painless way to set that up ?

Well I tend to find that with cupsys most of the time I can just print a
postscript file and it comes out right (As long as the postscript had
large enough margins to fit on the printer).

Lennart Sorensen
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