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1. Re: Parsing postscript file
Helge Blischke Apr 29, 2013 7:14 AM (in response to lazydba)Please post (an URL to) sample files for both versions for me to look into.
Helge
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2. Re: Parsing postscript file
lazydba Apr 29, 2013 10:21 AM (in response to Helge Blischke)Thank you for response, Helge.
Can I send these files by email?
Thnaks,
Alex
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3. Re: Parsing postscript file
lazydba Apr 29, 2013 10:57 AM (in response to lazydba)This image below shows the string we are looking for in good/old postscript file (Cristal Report 8.5).
Postscript file form CR 11.5 does not have this section at all, neither we can not find requested string at all
(looking in ASCI).
When we reconvert PS file from CR 11.5 with ps2txt.exe we can find something relative to our numbers but we are not sure if this is only way.
Thanks.
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4. Re: Parsing postscript file
Helge Blischke Apr 29, 2013 11:26 AM (in response to lazydba)Yes, you may send the files by email (address: h dot blischke at acm dot org).
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5. Re: Parsing postscript file
Helge Blischke Apr 29, 2013 2:02 PM (in response to lazydba)Hi Alex,
the CR 11.5 file has been produced with the feature "font subsetting" switched on.
That leads to a font encoding quite different from ordinary ASCII, for example
(from your 70016046.ps file):
<0201010304010504> (hex codes)
" 7 0 0 1 6 0 4 6" (equivalent ASCII characters)
Note that all text characters are encoded as hex strings, probably
due to the font subsetting feature.
Try to switch off the font subsetting (as I don't have a Win8 at hand, I cannot
tell you how to do this) and try again. Maybe the hex representation is the
default in your system, so you may need to try looking for the respective
hex string as well.
Helge
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6. Re: Parsing postscript file
lazydba Apr 29, 2013 2:47 PM (in response to Helge Blischke)Thank you, Helge.
I will do more research tomorrow.
May be you can advise some simplest script to convert hex to ascii? (this is in case if we would not be able to switch the font to ascii) we are using CR 11.5 from application so I would try to get from apps developers advice how can we have font converted .
Thanks a lot one more time,
Alex
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7. Re: Parsing postscript file
Helge Blischke Apr 30, 2013 1:28 AM (in response to lazydba)Alex,
I just ran both PS files through Ghostscript's ps2ascii utility, and whow!, in both cases
I got human readable ASCII output, thus showing that this utility fairly well copes
with the ad-hoc encoding used in the 11.5 PS file.
Due to confidentiality reasons I don't post the converted texts here but mail them to you by
separate email.
You will see by these examples that the 11.5 Crystal reports obviously preprocess constant parts
of the report contents and emit the variable parts afterwards, so that the variable data in the
ASCII text do not appear in the semantic context.
I'd suggest to install Ghostscript (recommended a fairly recent version, >= 9.01) and use the
ps2ascii utulity instead of your awk script.
Helge
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8. Re: Parsing postscript file
lazydba Apr 30, 2013 5:31 AM (in response to Helge Blischke)Thanks a lot, Helge.
Very valuable advice.
I will review our scripts today and will post results later.
Best regards,
Alex

