RE: parsing post script

On 25.11.2003 (13:09 Uhr +0530), Karthikeyan Ramnath wrote:

>thanks dude, thats what I'm doing(more or less). I've stripped all the font
>and formatting info and converted the simple text into a basic XML doc which
>specifies the X,Y position for each element.
>Next I hope to define a transform which will convert the absolute
>coordinates into more meaningful numbers like the column indices of a table
>etc...
>Any inputs in this regard will be more than welcome.

If you successfully extracted positioning data from the PostScript, you are relying on a very special format, because in the real world this data can be hidden in unlimited ways. The same is true for string data: it can be encoded  and even in the simplest environment non-ASCII characters will be octal coded numbers. Next: The way those numbers relate to certain glyphs (= letters of a given font) depends on the encoding vector, which can be set up (= programmed) in multiple ways as well...

Why can't you go back one step and work with the source of the PostScript files, or use that source to include machine parsable data (like comments) in the PostScript data?

- Michael

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