Printing Selected Pages
=======================
Sometimes you want to print not a complete PostScript document but just some
selected pages. Here are several options.
o DSC Conforming Documents
In a DSC (Document Structuring Conventions) conforming document all pages
are individually accessible, clearly delineated by DSC comments. You can
extract the pages you want to print before you send the result to a
PostScript printer or interpreter. A utility for extracting these pages is
pssplit:
pssplit.exe -- DOS executable
pssplit.c -- C source
o Non DSC Conforming Documents: PostScript Level 2
When there are no comments in the document to separate the document in
pages, then the only solution is to have the entire document processed by a
PostScript interpreter. However, PostScript Level 2 keeps track of the
number of pages it has output, and you can redefine the output routine to
tell PostScript to discard of the pages you don't want. A program that adds
the necessary code to achieve this is pspages:
pspages.exe -- DOS executable
pspages.c -- C source
o Non DSC Conforming Documents: Ghostscript
With Ghostscript, instead of having the output sent to a printer, you can
send it to a file instead. In this case, you can tell Ghostscript to divide
the output in one file per page. Then you can copy the files you want to
the printer. Here is an example:
gs -r300 -sDEVICE=djet500 -sOutputFile=file.%03d -dNOPAUSE file.ps -c quit
This will produce files like file.001, file.002, etc.
--
Peter Kleiweg
http://www.let.rug.nl/~kleiweg/
