Funky Stuff
There are often times when you will want to take an existing PostScript
document and manipulate it in some way. For example, you may be publishing
a book, and you want to print the pages with wide margins for proofing
notes (but you don't want to modify the book's layout). Maybe you are printing
out some 100-page manual, and you want to avoid using most of a rain forest
to print it. Maybe you want to print out some document with the word "Draft"
stamped beneath the pages. All of these things can be done in PostScript
by a postprocessor (that is, a program which manipulates an existing PostScript
file). Moreover, these are all things which may be difficult to manage
in the program you used to generate the files.
In this section, I'll show you the basic PostScript code to do each
of these jobs and how to use EPS comments to find the right places to insert
the additional PostScript.
You are welcome to use these programs as you will. Bear in mind, however,
that there are professionally written programs that do these jobs and more.
I strongly suggest that you look into buying such a program rather than
writing your own. Generally, they have already solved most of the problems.
Also, these packages usually come with tools you did not even knew were
possible. These examples, therefore, are more to give you a taste of what
is possible and how to do it, in case you want to roll your own post-processing
utility.
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pjw 12/21/96