Merging Postscript Files

In September 2000, John Deubert posted below to the newsgroup comp.lang.postscript on how to merge postscript files.

Sticking together .ps files?????

 In Short: How do I stick together 2 postscript files to produce one new one?
 

I assume you're concatenating these with a text editor. This works fine 
in principle, but in practice, an awful lot of PostScript files are 
sloppy about cleaning up after themselves, which leads to problems in 
the second (and following) files.

The easiest way to fix this is to put the following line in between each 
of the concatenated files:

   false 0 startjob pop

This actually causes the printer to end the current job (doing the 
normal eoj cleanup) and start a new job, all within the same PostScript 
stream.

A couple of caveats:

- This is a PS Level 2 operator, so it wonn't work on an earlier machine.

- The startjob operator will not start a nnew job if there are any 
un-restored saves in the PostScript. Most PostScript output manages to 
match its save and restores, so this shouldn't be a problem.

Hope this helps.

- John Deubert

For technical details, see the March 2001 Acumen Journal.

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