Is there an option for to me to ask Ghostscript to indent the Postscript it creates?
Everything starts at the beginning of a line and I find it difficult to follow.
Alternatively, I am using Emacs and ps-mode.
If anyone know how to indent code in this mode I would appreciate a tip (apologize because this may not be relevant to this StackExchange)
No, there is no option for indenting the output.
PostScript is pretty much regarded as a write-only language anyway, and the output of ps2write (which is what I assume you are using though you don't say) is particularly difficult since it fundamentally outputs PDF syntax with a PostScript program on the front to parse it into PostScript operations.
Why do you want to read it ?
[EDIT]
You can always edit your question, you don't need to post a new answer.
I'm afraid what you want to do isn't as simple as you might think.
It might be possible for this use case if the PDF files you receive are always created the same way, but there are significant problems.
The font you use as a substitute for the missing font must be encoded the same way. Say for example the font in the PDF file is encoded so that 0x41 is 'A', you need to make sure that the replacement font is also encoded so that 0x41 is an 'A'. So just the findfont, scalefont, setfont sequence is not always going to be sufficient, sometimes you will need to re-encode the font.
CIDFonts will be a major stumbling block. Firstly because ps2write simply doesn't emit CIDFonts at all. These were not part of level 2 PostScript. As a result all text in a CIDFont will be embedded as bitmaps. If your original file doesn't contain the CIDFont then you'll get the fallback CIDFont bitmapped.
Secondly CIDFonts can use multiple-byte character codes, of variable length. You can't simply replace a CIDFont with a Font, it just won't work.
The best solution, obviously, is to have the PDF files created with the fonts required embedded. This is best practice. If you can't get that, then I'd suggest that rather than trying to hand edit PostScript, you use the fontmap.GS and cidfmap files which Ghostscript uses to find font.
Ghostscript already has a load of code to do font substitution automatically, using both Fonts and CIDFonts as substitutes, and it does all the hard work of re-encoding the fonts or building CMaps as required. If you are on Windows much of this may already be done for you, when you install Ghostscript it will ask if you want to create font mappings. If you said yes then it will
Add the font substitutions you want to use in those files (they have comments explaining the layout) and then use the pdfwrite device to make a new PDF file. Set EmbedAllFonts to true (you may need to add a AlwayEmbed font array as well, listing the fonts specifically) and SubsetFonts to false.
That should create a new PDF file where the missing fonts have been replaced by your defined substitutes, those substitutes will have been embedded in the new PDF file and they have will not been subset (Acrobat will generally refuse to edit text in a subset font).
The switches I mentioned above are standard Adobe Distiller parameters, but they are documented for pdfwrite here. There's some documentation on adding fonts here and here and specifically for CIDFonts here.
Basically I'd suggest you define your substitutions and let Ghostscript do the work for you.
This is not an answer to the problem but rather an answer to KenS's question about "Why do you want to read it?"
I tried to put it in the comment box but it was too long.
I am a retired engineer with a strong programming background.
I would like to read and understand the postscript code for the reason shown below.
I play duplicate bridge as a hobby. I recieve a PDF file of what is know as a convention card (a single page document of bridge agreements).
Frequently I would like to edit these files.
When I open with Adobe Illustrator I have to spend a significant amount of time replacing fonts that are not on my system with fonts that I do have.
I can take the PDF and export it as a postscript file using Ghostscript.
I was going to write a little program to replace the embedded fonts with the fonts that I use to replace them.
I was going to leave the postscript file unaltered and insert things like
/HelveticaMonospacedPro-RG findfont
12 scalefont setfont
just above where the text is written.
I was planning on using the fonts that I have on my system (e.g., HelveticaMonospacedPro-RG).
I am struggling to convert my PCL file to PDF using GhostScript. The conversion itself is not issue, but it appears that Cyrillic is problem. As you can see on attached picture, it considers only the colon and period symbol.
I tried different fonts and symbol sets, but I never got correct result.
I was also trying to convert cyrillic TTF to soft font via PCL Paraphernalia but I was not successfull with using the font in my PCL.
Using following command:
gpcl6win64.exe -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dNOCACHE -dRENDERTTNOTDEF -sOutputFile=output.pdf CYR.prn
My file:
PDF output:
Please advise.
Thank you
At a guess, you have not supplied the font, or the font you are using does not contain Cyrillic glyphs. Colon and period are obviously going to be present in any Latin font, Cyrillic glyphs generally are not. Any glyphs not present in the font will be replaced by the /.notdef glyph, which is usually a non-marking glyph (except for TrueType fonts where it's usually a hollow square).
If that's your entire PCL file then I can't say I'm surprised it doesn't work as you expect, you haven't downloaded a font. I don't know PCL well enough to say exactly what that minimal file is doing but here's a thought: try using gpclwin64 to render the PCL to the display. If that doesn't work then there's no way it's going to result in a PDF file which works.
Basically you're going to have to download a soft font containing the glyphs you want to use encoded at the character codes you want to use.
NB: I'd strongly advise against using -dNOCACHE because that will hurt performance on large text-heavy files.
I would like to create a postscript or pdf figure with enhanced notations, italic or bold Latin characters, and sometimes (regular) Greek characters. How to do that in general?
Let's say I downloaded CMU Sans Serif, a font that has glyphs for all the strange characters I ever want to use. I converted them to pfa with an online tool and copied the files to the path of working directory.
Expectations
Let's say I'd like to produce the following notation somewhere.
What I tried: original
I create a gnuplot script encoded in a utf-8 file (without BOM) with the content
set term postscript eps enhanced "CMUSansSerif" 15 fontfile add 'CMUSansSerif.pfa' fontfile add 'CMUSansSerif-Oblique.pfa' fontfile add 'CMUSansSerif-Bold.pfa'
set encoding utf8
set o "print.eps"
p x t "Label: {/CMUSansSerif-Bold important }{/CMUSansSerif-Oblique note}: ∫⟨α₂ + β²⟩ = äßű"
set o
and executed with the newest gnuplot, version 5.2.6.
What I got
I used a vector graphics editor to open the eps file and relevant part looks like this:
What I also tried
According to Ethan's answer I added adobeglyphnames to the termoptions. It made at least the letters available but other Unicode symbols are still unavailable. The result is:
Question
What went wrong? How could I produce the desired output?
So many possibilities, where things can go wrong: Is the font not suitable for this task? Did I download a wrong version of it? Did the pfa converter do a bad job? Did I include the font files incorrectly? Was there something wrong with the set encoding? Do I use a bad vector graphics editor? Do I have wrong fonts installed and the vector graphics editor tries to use them?
I am afraid that the answer is that in general PostScript is the wrong tool for this. If it is at all possible for you to work with PDF output instead, I suggest you do that. It is even possible the resulting PDF file can be translated to a PostScript file by standard tools (e.g. pdf2ps). That is likely to work if the non-ascii characters are limited to Greek and other relatively common symbols but I don't know how much of the full unicode tables are covered by those standard tools.
If you really need to produce PostScript with additional unicode characters directly from gnuplot, you can find full instructions and sample character encoding tables in the gnuplot distribution files:
.../term/PostScript/unicode_maps.README
.../term/PostScript/unicode_big.map
.../term/PostScript/unicode_small.map
I am not familiar with the online tool font conversion you used but probably it failed because it did not have, or at any rate did not use, suitable character encoding tables for the desired conversion.
===
One other thought. There are two ways that a *.pfa font can encode unicode characters that are common enough to have a name assigned by Adobe for use in PostScript. (1) It may use generic names like uni0439 for Unicode code points. (2) It may use Adobe-specific names from the list here:
agl-aglfn glyph list
When selecting PostScript output from gnuplot you can tell it which of these two conventions is used by the font you provide. The default is "noadobeglyphnames".
set term postscript {no}adobeglyphnames
==
(recipe for using "set term pdfcairo")
Font handling is unfortunately system-specific, so I cannot tell you how to install or configure fonts on all your target machines. I will show you a procedure that works on a linux desktop that uses the fontconfig utilities for system font handling.
Create directory /home/share/fonts/CMUSans
Add this directory to the search list in file /etc/fonts/local.conf
Copy *.ttf files into this directory from the CMU Sans Serif zip archive you link to in your original query. The system fontconfig system tools should now be able to find these fonts. By inspection they self-report as "CMU Sans Serif"
in gnuplot (tested with version 5.2.6)
set term pdfcairo font "CMU Sans Serif,15"
set output 'enhanced_utf8.pdf'
load 'enhanced_utf8.dem'
convert output pdf file to PostScript with the following command
pdf2ps enhanced_utf8.pdf enhanced_utf8.ps
Screenshot of the result is shown below
It seems that CMU Sans Serif doesn't contain the UTF-8 characters you are asking for. Check the font with a font editor like Birdfont. Although the webpage shows symbols you want to use, the font itself does not contain them. However, your browser may show symbols, but they are just fallback representations from other fonts.
Take the character "ب". It shows in stack overflow. I can see this in a cshtml file and in a js file
The character "ُ" on the other hand shows here correctly. However it shows as a question mark in the cshtml file and js file. If I copy it to notepad it shows as a Ḍammah (a loop normally above a letter which indicates a 'u' sound)
Why is it a question mark in the cshtml file if notepad understands it? ALso Visual Studio understands other arabic characters so why not this one
All I can think of is that a Dammah (as far as I know) always sits above another letter so can't be used in isolation?
What I'm trying to do is detect words that have a Dammah in them via Javascript
I'm completely new to unicode and non acii characters so this may be a stupid question, apologies if so
It often happens that an application uses a default font that does not support all the unicode characters that a usecase requires. In such a case, try to change the font to a more compatible one. "Courier New" works mostly well, also "Arial Unicode MS" does a good job. But there is no font that covers totally everything, so maybe you will need to switch between two or three fonts to cover all required characters. For Arabic, "Arial" is a good choice, but there are many interesting alternatives.
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I need some tool to display text containing ANSI codes correctly on Windows. No full support needed, but at least coloring/bold is a must.
Reason: My logger/debug module produce nicely rendered rich output with important sections colored using ANSI codes. This helps a lot when debugging on the serial terminal, but if I dump the debug to a file or copy-paste it into a text editor on Windows (interactive remote debug is not always viable), at best all the ANSI codes are stripped, at worst they are rendered as junk characters obscuring the real data. Rudimentary editing capabilities would be appreciated to be able to pick out specific parts, annotate, and so on.
The open-source editor Atom has the package language-ansi-styles. It supports all kinds of formatting except ;r;g;b.
You might have some more luck with ASCII/ANSI utilities, like the ones listed here:
List of ASCII/ANSI/NFO utilities
**Note: some files on this page might be outdated, you might find newer versions of these utilities on their respective homepages.*
For example, the latest version of NFOPad can be found here.
I've been looking for a solution to display the ANSI colors as well (for program debug output readability) and stumbled upon Sublime Text (paid software with trial http://www.sublimetext.com/) with a the ANSIescape package (https://github.com/aziz/SublimeANSI or installed through the package control).
It supports coloring and the bold escape is recognized but not displayed, although a special color can be assigned to it in the settings file. Also worth noting that this plugin shows text in read-only mode, and needs to be turned off if editing is necessary.
Here is the screenshot provided on the github, and I have personally tried it and verified it works:
If you're primarily interested in viewing the file instead of editing it, Ansifilter will convert it to HTML, which you can then view and at least search in your browser, or RTF if wordpad would be good enough (hard to imagine). Huh, looks like there's a notepad++ plugin version on the download page, too, so that might be perfect if it allows you to load into notepad++.
http://www.andre-simon.de/doku/ansifilter/ansifilter.html
There's also a different plugin for vim which colors text according to ANSI codes.
http://www.vim.org/scripts/script.php?script_id=302
However, while it highlights the text in the correct color, it leaves the ANSI codes themselves in there (in a faded, near-background color) which probably will mess up any alignment formatting in the file, as well as making it harder to move around the file (lots of "empty space" to wade the cursor through, searching for a word won't match if there's an ansi code in the middle of it, etc.). There's a patch it can take advantage of to hide the codes too, but that would require patching and then recompiling vim itself from source.
Yeah, suggesting vim is pretty unhelpful if you aren't a vim user already, it has too huge of a learning curve, I know. But it might be useful to the vim users out there.
I know it won't be of much help - but I was looking for the exact same thing on linux; was just trying to view some log outputs that had bash ANSI color codes inside. Unfortunately, those ANSI color codes were spread across several lines - meaning 'cat'-ing the file and piping into 'less -R', 'most' and similar tools, would simply display the starting line where the color originated, but not the subsequent lines that should've been colored.
Funnily enough, I thought usual Linux tools like 'nano', 'gedit', 'vim' and whatnot would have capabilities for ANSI color codes in a text file, but it's very modest out there with info on ANSI color in text files in these editors. I've only found info on ANSI color for the test editor 'joe':
Cheap ANSI Color! - http://tldp.org/LDP/LG/issue01to08/articles.html#ansi
but couldn't get the recommendations there to work (also couldn't get 'emacs' to work either, at least not by directly reading a text file with ANSI color characters inside).
The good thing - it seems what you need, if you need ANSI color in text, is to look for ASCII art / NFO utilities as recommended above - and the one that I finally found, and was working for me, was tetradraw (via www.linux.org/apps/AppId_42.html ; can be sudo apt-get installed in Ubuntu ... actually, tetradraw is the name of the drawing/editor part - however there is a separate viewer that also works with ANSI color codes, tetraview).
Well, who would have thought, that you need to track down an ASCII art utility, in order to read log files :)
Anyways, hope this may somehow help in the further search of ANSI color text editors for Windows, too.. Cheers!
If you just want to view then the terminal program "Tera Term" can do this. Just click "File" -> "Replay Log" and select your file containing the ANSI codes.
You can download Tera Term here:
http://logmett.com/index.php?/download/tera-term-477-freeware.html
In Emacs, just eval the following before opening your .nfo file:
(add-to-list 'auto-coding-alist '("\\.nfo\\'" . cp437-dos))
I have been a while testing multiple programs on the URL refered by Andras Vass with no results (they don't show colors, or they keep showing ANSI codes as a mess of characters).
Tired of searching I have finally found ANSIFilter (not the NotePad++ plugin refered by Jeffson), the only that works for me.
I have added it to Windows context menu, so I can now easily open my ANSI text files.
I would be surprised if emacs can't do that.
At least with the embeded shell.
There are:
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/AnsiTerm
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/MultiTerm
http://www.emacswiki.org/emacs/ansi-color.el
Update: as it had been pointed, they are just term output colorizers. But if you can edit the shell buffer contents in emacs too, eg. cat file && colorize.
But wait a minute, I had just found these:
http://vaperized.com/ansiexpress.htm
http://www.syaross.org/thedraw/
http://picoe.ca/products/pablodraw/
If the debug logging of your application goes via 1 class/function, you could try to split the output so that:
ANSI-like logging is shown on the terminal/console
HTML-like logging is written to file
For your application all logging goes to this class, and this class splits the output to terminal/console and file.
Make a 'standard' in your logging class for specifying colors and boldness (e.g. predefined codes like Ctrl-A means red, Ctrl-B means bold, ..., or specific methods in the logging class for setting the color and boldness, or maybe even the ANSI-codes), and translate this in your central logging class to:
the correct ANSI codes on terminal
the correct HTML codes in file
Alternatively, I think that instead of HTML you also could use rich-text, but I don't know all the possibilities of rich text so you may have to look this up.
You could try notepad++ (see http://notepad-plus.sourceforge.net/uk/site.htm). It's pretty powerful (Scintilla based) and has an option to view non-printable characters (like line-breaks and the like).