Re: page number ranges

[Ted Harding]

( Re Message From: Jeffrey H Kingston )
> 
> I've had a suggestion that an option for printing only a
> selected range of pages should be added to Lout.  I declined
> to do this on the grounds that it is best placed in a
> postprocessor.
> 
> Does anyone know of a PostScript processor that will print a
> selected range of pages?  I wrote one ages ago, and I would be
> willing to make it available if there is any demand for it, but
> I don't want to waste my time maintaining a program that
> duplicates some widespread other program that I don't know about.
> 
> Jeff
> 
> ps I know that you can select pages to print one at a time
> in Ghostview, but I don't call that convenient.

Jeff himself undoubtedly well knows this: but it needs to be pointed out
that there is no 100% reliable method of even /counting/ the number of
pages a general PostScript file will cause to be printed, short of
observing the behaviour of the printer/renderer itself.

However, if the PS file sufficiently conforms to PostScript Document
Structuring Conventions, then there is, for instance, the package of
utilities called "psutils", available according to the appended info.
The version which I pulled in August is psutils_1.16-3.tar.gz.

The program in psutils which will select particular pages is "psselect".

There was an in-depth discussion of such questions on the list
address@hidden back in August. The outcome was that in most cases
of DSC-conformant files psutils should work, but can be defeated.

Whether the utilities will work reliably with Lout output is a matter for
testing!

Best wishes to all,
Ted.                                    (address@hidden)

PS Despite Jeff's view that page selection "is best placed in a
   postprocessor", in view of the lurking difficulties hinted at above and
   also the possible inconvenience of post-processing entire PostScript
   files, I personally remain of the view that page selection is best done
   at the formatting stage before the PS output is generated, as in troff.
   However, this is partly a "horses for courses" issue: Lout is more
   tightly tied to PostScript output than troff (at any rate groff) is;
   groff output is "semi-device-independent" and conversion into
   device-specific format (ASCII, PS, .dvi ... ) is done by the
   appropriate post-processor, which receives troff output only for the
   selected pages. Post-processing for page selection would require a
   different program for each output format; the tricky one, as noted
   above, is PostScript.

----------------------------------------------------------------------------
Finding psutils (Information from Owen Leblanc)
You'll find it as part of the FreeBSD source on sites which have that,
or as part of the Debian Linux distribution on sites which support
that; for example, at ftp.mcc.ac.uk in
/pub/linux/distributions/Debian/unstable/source/text.  I think
Red Hat Linux has it as well.  It appeared comp.sources.misc, along with
a number of patches, so sites which have that should contain it.