On Fri, 16 Oct 1998, Steve Quint wrote:

> Actually, all of the filter packages that I've looked into uses file magic
> to determine the file type, which I guess would be bad if you really wanted
> to dump the ASCII in a postscript file to the printer.

That was my initial concern, although I suppose it would be easy
enough to deal with it. It's simply a matter of personal taste. The
only real postscript printer I'm familiar with is an old DEC 3200
attached to an Alpha running Open VMS. It needs a switch on the
command line to do postscript, and I never saw a problem with that.
 
> My major concern is how to distinct a color file with a black and white
> file.  Do they look the same to ghostscript?

It's in the postscript file. All Postscript systems can handle B&W,
and greyscale. The color extensions work on all level 2 printers,
wether they actually have color or not, and on some level 1.
Ghostscript 5 supports level 2. Now, the Pro has both a CMYK and
Black, so it just prints whatever color is called for. The 3200, a
greyscale level 2, puts out a reasonable greyscale facsimile of a
color jpeg. My mac has the B&W Xserver, which doesn't give ghostscript
on X very much to work with, but color-ps files don't look all that
bad in B&W, considering. I hope that answers your question.

> Just curious here, but does the stcolor.ps device work for you in ghostscript.

Yes, it does. That's the old driver--the universal drivers make it
obsolete. If you look in a "upp" file, it's mainly a color translation
table, so presumably you could tweak it by hand, or, more likely,
obtain some kind of color calibration tool for making a new one
specifically for your own paper and ink. In any case, I get good
results with the "stc.upp" driver. JPEGS are about as good as you'd
expect; the real postscript examples, the tiger and the golfer look
great; and the ghostscript fonts are simply beautiful.