What is epsmerge?
epsmerge is a program that will (hopefully :-) merge encapsulated postscript (EPS) files into one or more encapsulated postscript files (or non-encapsulated postscript). Generating EPS is useful for later inclusion in a TeX document (say), and generating (non-encapsulated) postscript is useful for sending pages directly to a printer.
- Requirements
epsmerge should run on any Perl from version 5.0 and up, without any downloads from CPAN. Developed and tested on UNIX, but brave people have reported success on Microsoft Windows NT.
Where to get it:
As I tend to move around a bit these days, the canonical and thoroughly recommended way of finding the latest release of epsmerge is through freshmeat (http://freshmeat.net/). Find the appindex section and look in section Console/Text Utilities (it is in this section mainly because it already contained some postscript utilities when I first submitted to freshmeat). I don't always announce when there is a minor patch or upgrade, though, but try my best to keep the links working anyway.
- Documentation
You will find the documentation in the ./docs directory as a text file, a man page, and a HTML page. If this is not enough, then you'll find the original POD in the ./devel directory.
Copyright(s):
epsmerge is Copyright (C) 1999-2000 Jens G Jensen <jens@argaeus.ma.rhbnc.ac.uk>. This program is distributed under the GNU General Public License. In particular, there is NO WARRANTY of any kind whatsoever. Please refer to the file COPYING for details.
- Trademarks
Postscript is a trademark of Adobe Systems, Inc.
Windows NT is probably a trademark of Microsoft Corporation.
UNIX is a trademark of The Open Group. Or maybe X/Open. Actually, I don't really care^Wknow who owns it, but it belongs to someone, OK? If you (1) own the trademark and (2) you think the above attribution is wrong and (3) you really, really cannot sleep till you know I've fixed it, by all means send me a note.
- Installation
Since you are reading this, you have probably successfully untarred epsmerge to some directory. All you need now is an epsmerge command somewhere in your path. Typically, if you install for the whole system you would put the command in /usr/local/bin; if you just install it for yourself, you'd probably put it in ~/bin and add this directory to your path.
Say you unpacked epsmerge in /usr/local (meaning that all the files now reside in /usr/local/epsmerge-xxx, where xxx is a version number), and you want to have the command run from /usr/local/bin. If you chose different directories, it's the same procedure, mutatis mutandis.
In the rest of this section,
/usr/local/epsmerge-xxx
stands for the directory that contains all the epsmerge files, and xxx
really is the version number;
/usr/local/bin
stands for any directory in your path;
Method 0:
Hold your breath until I write a canonical installation script (not recommended).
Method 1:
Create a file called `epsmerge' (without the quotes) in /usr/local/bin with the following content:
perl -w -I/usr/local/epsmerge-xxx/lib /usr/local/epsmerge-xxx/epsmerge "$@"
(in one line; type the proper version number instead of xxx), and make the file that you just created executable (`chmod 755 epsmerge').
Method 2:
cd /usr/local/bin
ln -s ../epsmerge-xxx/epsmerge epsmerge
That's it. The `../epsmerge-xxx/epsmerge' is the relative path to the epsmerge script; yours may look different. (You could also use absolute paths instead.) You'll need to test it, though: if you get the error message
bash: epsmerge: No such file or directory
or something similar, it's probably because
- /usr/local/bin is not in your path. Type echo $PATH to see if it's
there. If not, type (Korn type shells)
PATH=/usr/local/bin:$PATH
or (C type shells)
setenv PATH /usr/local/bin:$PATH
_or_
2. your perl is not in /usr/bin/ where epsmerge expects to find it.
Type `whereis perl'. It might say something like
perl: /usr/local/bin/perl5.005 /usr/local/bin/perl
In that case, change the first line of
/usr/local/epsmerge-xxx/epsmerge to the correct path (namely,
`#!/usr/local/bin/perl -w')
(The `-w' is just there to make epsmerge complain if things
look wrong.)
If you get an error
bash: epsmerge: Permission denied
it's because /usr/local/epsmerge-xxx/epsmerge doesn't have correct execute (or read) permissions; do
chmod 755 /usr/local/epsmerge-xxx/epsmerge
- Credits
I would like to thank the following people for valuable comments and/or patient testing and/or whatever regarding epsmerge and/or epssplit:
Tobias Buchal, Franz Domes, Craig Markwardt, Stefan Schreyjak
Special thanks to Matthijs van Leeuwen and Paul Craven for particularly patient testing.
Special apologies to the people that should have been mentioned above but aren't (from the earliest stages of the projects). I grepped my (normally encrypted, of course) mail archives, but couldn't find them.
Last but not least, thanks to freshmeat; to Wall et al. for Perl; and to everybody that downloads and uses epsmerge or epssplit.
How to reach me:
Comments, bug-reports, patches, remarks, etc, are very welcome. I can be reached at <jens@argaeus.ma.rhbnc.ac.uk> or (from 2001) <jens@argaeus.ma.rhul.ac.uk>