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["mikkel meinike" <mimeini AT gmail.com>]

Ciao!

 

There have bin some discussion on this list about word processing and text formatting on this old machines with BL. I can't run any word WYSIWYG word processor on my machine with BL3. I am studieng postscript programmig for the moment and that have given me a new perceptive on this subject that I very much like to share with you.

Postscript is a programming languish like C or Perl ore Java. That in it self is scering at lest for me, but some good peaople have programmed small routines in postscript that sort of built a word processor inside the postscript program ore put in other words you have the word processor inside your document. It would be more correct to say that the postscript program is transformed in to a simple markup languish. So you open your postscript program in your favorite text editor and you are faced with, what I think is a fascinating thing about postscript, that everything is inside this program file. That is: The postscript program for easy typesetting, the fonts that you use represended as endless lines of numbers or as postscript coding, any images that you use again represented as endless lines of numbers or as postscript coding. That means you will have to find the right place in between all this coding to start typesetting your document, but once you have found that place everything is quit simple if you use this pre-build routines that I have talked about. You type in your text in berries and follow that with a single character ore two to deside on the justification you want for that text. Like this:

 

( A long paragraph with several lines ) w

 

Will come out "wordwrapped" to the printer ore to "ghostview" (GV)

 

All you will need to have on your BL system is Ghostscript (GS) and the gs-font and GV (remember GS comes in two versions in SL4 one for svga and one fore X11).

One very special thing about direct postscript typesetting is that you are platform independent. If your old laptop breaks and you have the file on floppy you can take your floppy to the local libere and use a windows machine that will probably have adobe acrobat and you can work here and view the result with acrobat.

And then the typesetting (images setting) capability of this way is fare more powerful then f. ex. Abiword it is like adope pagmaker on your small BL system, but then you will have to get in to coding in postscript. 

 

I have followed this book to set up my own formatting codes.

 

http://www.cappella.demon.co.uk/bookpdfs/pracpost.pdf

 

But here are links to this pre-build word processors for postscript that you put inside your program here

http://www.anastigmatix.net/postscript/direct.html
 

love

/Mikkel