Subject: Re: jade/jadetex with tables (was: Re: jade/jadetex & 2 questions) From: "Jack Fitzpatrick" <jfitzpatrick@xxxxxxxxxx> Date: Fri, 21 May 1999 21:42:14 +0000 |
----- Original Message ----- From: Joerg Wittenberger <Joerg.Wittenberger@xxxxxxxxx> To: <dssslist@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> Cc: <jjc@xxxxxxxxxx> Sent: Friday, May 21, 1999 3:55 AM Subject: jade/jadetex with tables (was: Re: jade/jadetex & 2 questions) > ********************************************************************** > * Anyway using the rtf backend would be an option as well. Is there * > * any command line converter from rtf to postscript or pdf? * > ********************************************************************** Jerry, I wrestled with this for the better part of a year. Being previously a Unix biggot, I wanted a simple command line utility to convert SGML to Postscript in a stream. My documents are virtually all tables, with images and shaded cells, and other than the unfortunate lack of row spans, RTF was really the only solution. Though MIF was close, Tex was a total bust. But I could find nothing that faithfully converted RTF to page description language except for MS Word on Windows. I ended up building a little Windows server in Perl which runs Jade and processes the RTF through Word using OLE, and returns Postscript back to Unix (it will also return RTF with the images embedded :) . The addition of Adobe Acrobat (not the free version unfortunately) now provides a PDF option on my server. Acrobat actually gives you two PDF options: 1) a printer driver that will produce PDF directly from any Windows app (PDFWriter); and 2) conversion of Postscript (Distiller) to PDF. PDFWriter is faster, and Distiller is more feature-rich, though either produces reasonably compact PDF. The problem is that Acrobat only works with native Word files, not RTF, otherwise you might be able to run the Unix version directly. Now that I'm a Windows wannabe, I'm wishing we had a GDI version of Jade, and forget the portability. And I still need a robust plain text backend for my little old 3270 friends. I'm using nroff, which is apparently unchanged since the 70's, and chokes easily. Haven't had much luck using fixed pitch RTF with either the Word text export option or generic line printer driver. Any ideas? Jack Fitzpatrick ADP DSSSList info and archive: http://www.mulberrytech.com/dsssl/dssslist
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