[gs-devel] Re: bbox device dropped in ghostscript-7.20rc*

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

rillian <rillian at telus.net> writes on Mon, 1 Apr 2002 13:32:35 -0800
about the missing bbox device:

>> We removed it from the default build on the assumption that it was
>> mostly used internally.

Nope, it was added, as Peter Deutsch noted in the last gs-devel
digest, for getting accurate bounding boxes, something that no other
freely-available tool can do.

In my experience, virtually no PostScript-producing software, other
than what I write myself, plus "gs -sDEVICE=bbox", produces accurate
bounding boxes.  Since we do a great deal of figure inclusion in TeX
documents, we need correct %%BoundingBox comments, and a little local
wrapper around gs's -sDEVICE=bbox can take a list of PostScript files
on the command line, and automatically insert correct %%BoundingBox
values in them.

Thus, I really want that device to be available by default, and for
more people to know about it.  The wrapper script could easily be
polished and distributed with future gs releases.  I call it autobbox,
but better choices for a name are welcome.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
- Nelson H. F. Beebe                    Tel: +1 801 581 5254                  -
- Center for Scientific Computing       FAX: +1 801 585 1640, +1 801 581 4148 -
- University of Utah                    Internet e-mail: beebe at math.utah.edu  -
- Department of Mathematics, 110 LCB        beebe at acm.org  beebe at computer.org -
- 155 S 1400 E RM 233                       beebe at ieee.org                    -
- Salt Lake City, UT 84112-0090, USA    URL: http://www.math.utah.edu/~beebe  -
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------