SUMMARY: Postscript debugger, anyone?

From: Per Stromgren (pers@ppvku.ericsson.se)
Date: Wed Dec 15 1993 - 16:38:52 CST


Cheers!

        The net is fast, again. As I mentioned in another post,
I really hope I can do something for you sometime!
        I was asking if there is some kind of postscript debugger
that I can use to decludge the postscript code that various systems
genarate and try to put on paper. Consensus seem to be that there
is no such program, even if ghostscript/ghostview can do some,
and even pageview can work. Other authors suggested that I could
load pre-code into the printers that could print what the problems
are.

Ian Farquhar <ifarqhar@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au> said

"Obtain the file ehandler.ps from ftp.adobe.com. If you download this
job, it will replace the errordict with one which gives you a printed
error and stack dump on the page, which is usually enough for you to
figure out just where the job went wrong.

Ghostscript isn't a bad solution, and I debugged quite a bit of Postscript
code using NeWS pageview too. These are not suitable for those really
nasty implementation-dependent problems, but those are mercifully rare."

dov@orbot.co.il (Dov Grobgeld) said:

(I had to translate this, it was in swedish! From Israel, not bad!)

"'Offending command' is quite simple, it simply means that the command
does not exist in any of the dictionaries on the stack. This could be due
to use of a so called procset which sits in the printer. Another source
of problems could be that 'showpage' is lacking."

He also mentioned the error handler, loadable into the printer.

sommer@vsun02.ag01.Kodak.com (Tilman Sommer) also put me on the procset
and downloadable errorhandler track.

Thanks to:

 chughey@tango.cos.com (Carl Hughey)
 phil@dgbt.doc.ca (Phil Blanchfield)
 Ian Farquhar <ifarqhar@laurel.ocs.mq.edu.au>
 Dave Fetrow <fetrow@biostat.washington.edu>
 pallas@oclc.org (George Pallas)
 owens@hpn.TRW.COM (Mark G. Owens)
 dov@orbot.co.il (Dov Grobgeld)
 sommer@vsun02.ag01.Kodak.com (Tilman Sommer)
 Adobe PostScript File Server <ps-file-server@mv.us>
 rlyle@nl.oracle.com (Rob Lyle UNIX Sys Admin)
 Nate Mann AP35-1008 x4774 <ndmann@tacl.dnet.ge.com>
 shandelm@jpmorgan.com (Joel Shandelman
 Heas <heas@chpc.org>

 
 Regards,
 Per Strvmgren,
 Programatic Sweden AB.
 pers@ppvku.ericsson.se

Original post:

>
> Ciao, folks!
>
> We have a fairly large network of SUNs,PCs, vaxen and
> other machines, that produces postscript code and sends it off to
> our network connected HP Laserjet III:s. A very common problem
> for the support department is to clear out why the printout
> does not make it to paper. It would be very nice to have some
> sort of tool that could show us what goes wrong in the post-
> script code. It should, for instance, be able to tell us how
> much stack memory is needed to run it, and why a command is
> "offending".
>
> Is there anything within NeWs that can do this, for example?
> Anything from GNU/FSF?
>
>
>



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