PostScript prologue [was: 16-bit versions of gnuplot doomed?]

[Ethan M. <merritt@u.washington.edu>]

On Wednesday 25 February 2004 01:03 am, Hans-Bernhard Broeker wrote:
>
> DOS-16bit works, sort of.  But that's after I disabled most of the bit
> optional features (filled boxes, PM3D) *and* removed pretty much all
> terminal drivers besides dospc (the interactive graphics driver), table
> and cgm.  Yes, that does mean I had to throw out post.trm ;-( The reason
> post.trm had to go is the PS_header[] string array.  This is simply too
> large, ...

It occurs to me that we might use the approach of Adobe products
like FrameMaker.  The long PostScript prolog that is constant for
every output document is stored as a separate file in some appropriate
directory, and then copied into the output stream when a new 
document is being generated.

This has a number of advantages:

1) It doesn't take up any space in the source code module, which is
   what your DOS compiler doesn't handle well

2) It allows local customization of the prologue without having to
   recompile the main program. 
   This would allow customization of A4/letter page size, selection of colors,
   dash-dot styles, and alternate character encodings.

3) It is possible to have multiple, printer- or language- specific, prologues.

The only possible down-side I can think of at the moment is that this
separate prologue file might get lost if the installation process is botched.
But this shouldn't be any worse than having to correctly find the outboard
gnuplot_x11 driver, or the help file.





-- 
Ethan A Merritt       merritt@u.washington.edu
Biomolecular Structure Center    (206)543-1421
Mailstop 357742
University of Washington, Seattle, WA 98195