[ale] Printing ps/pdf files

[Joe Steele]

There are ways to edit the postscript file directly which would 
adjust your output.  But for those who don't know postscript, I'd say 
your best bet is to use a tool such as pstops, which is part of 
psutils, available at ftp://ftp.dcs.ed.ac.uk/pub/ajcd/psutils.tar.gz 
(or else through freshmeat.net).  

You will probably need to edit the following in Makefile.unix:  
   PAPER=letter
   PERL = /usr/bin/perl
   MANDIR = /usr/local/man/man$(MANEXT)

Rename Makefile.unix to Makefile, then 'make', then 'make install'

You could then 'man pstops', but what you really need to do is 
something like this:

   pstops '0(0in,-0.25in)' INPUTFILE.ps > OUTPUTFILE.ps

This will move the page 0" to the right and -0.25" up (negative 
motion means it is really moving down).

If the image also needs to be scaled down, then try something like 
this:

   pstops '0 at 0.95(0in,-0.25in)' INPUTFILE.ps > OUTPUTFILE.ps

This will first move the image (as before) and then scale it down to 
95% full size.  However, the result of scaling may not work as you 
first expect.  It helps to understand that scaling is relative to 
wherever the origin is.  In this case, the origin started in the 
lower left corner, but was moved down 0.25" with the rest of the 
image before scaling was performed.

--Joe

-----Original Message-----
From:	Chris Egolf [SMTP:cegolf at ugholf.net]
Sent:	Wednesday, January 16, 2002 9:46 AM
To:	ale at ale.org
Subject:	[ale] Printing ps/pdf files

All -

I downloaded a manual in ps format which apparently doesn't have a top 
margin.  The problem is that the header on each page is placed along 
the very top edge which falls in the no-print zone of the 3 different 
printers I've tried.  

I've tried viewing and printing it w/ gv and I've also converted to a pdf
w/ ps2pdf and used Adobe Acrobat Reader and others to try and force it to 
'fit to page' etc in an effort to recenter it.

I'm wondering if there's some way to convert the ps file to some other
document layout format (Latex?), reformat it and convert it back to ps/pdf
for printing, but I have no idea where to start.  Better yet, is there
some way to force the existing ps file to insert a top margin on each
page?

Anyone care to share a clue?  

Thanks in advance.

-- 
============================================================================
                               Chris Egolf
             http://www.ugholf.net     cegolf at ugholf.net   
============================================================================


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