I'm not a programmer, just a befuddled newbie with a problem.

I have a database that spits out hideous-looking tables that I want
to be able to edit in my word processor. The database will not let me
export, will not output tab-delimited text, etc. It just gives
me two choices: I can print, or save a postscript file to disk.

So....

Is there any converter or method of
taking that postscript file and converting it into an editable text
file? I'm working on a Mac so that's my first choice of platforms,
but have access to Windows.

Please email any suggestions to me at:

Thanks,

Susan

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SAILOR DOUBLE SUPER CRYING ATTACK!!!!!

Reposting article removed by rogue canceller.

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SAILOR DOUBLE SUPER CRYING ATTACK!!!!!

Ready? Here's the short answer: NO, no such program.

Pulling ps -> ascii is a very difficult problem and while
there are plenty of attempts to do it, nothing works correctly
all the time. These aren't even my word: see article 45.27
of UNIX Power Tools from O'Reilly and Associates.

-usman

Reposting article removed by rogue canceller.

Ready? Here's the short answer: NO, no such program.

Pulling ps -> ascii is a very difficult problem and while
there are plenty of attempts to do it, nothing works correctly
all the time. These aren't even my word: see article 45.27
of UNIX Power Tools from O'Reilly and Associates.

-usman

To my best knowledge: No, there is no such program. Extracting text to
an ascii file is very complicated, because text strings can be handled
in many different ways in the Postscript file. (Remember, Postscript is
a programming language, not a file format)
However:
1) If the PS files in question are all generated from the same
application through the same driver, it *is* possible to write a program
that will work on this particular flavour of Postscript.
2) You can create a pdf file from the Postscript by using Adobe Acrobat,
then read in the pdf in the Acrobat reader, and then cut/paste into any
word processor. This might, at least, make things easier.

"Befuddled newbie" ?  
-Well, aren't we all?
After all, Life is certainly not for beginners or first-timers :-)

Regards,
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    http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/

GSview uses a program called pstotext to do the actual text extraction.
pstotext has a command-line interface rather than a graphical user interface
like GSview, and is available in source form for Unix.  See

    http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/virtualpaper/pstotext.html

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voice: 1 415 853 2255, fax: 1 415 853 2104
http://www.research.digital.com/SRC/personal/Paul_McJones/home.html

Read more about it (and find the Unix version) at
    http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/pstotext.html  

The MSDOS executable is at:
      http://www.cs.ruu.nl/~piet/software.html  

-------------------------------------------------------------------
Jim Land, Minneapolis
Visit the Postscript/Ghostscript Resources WebPage:
http://www.geocities.com/SiliconValley/5682/postscript.html

If you then print your tables to PS, in the file (which is an ascii
text file) you should see (after a prolog that might be a hundred or
so lines)  each line as something like:
(columna1     columna2      columna3)show
(Could be some other command equivalent to show -- and there could be
some other commands to move the writing point (eg 234 45 m)
Then just edit this file in a wp to delete the prolog, shows and (),
leaving something like
columna1     columna2    columna3
columnb1     columnb2    columnb3

Lotus or Excel are smart enough to parse this into a worksheet.