[OS X TeX] Off-topic PS and Terminal questions

[Ross Moore]

> 
> 2) Are there utilities or shell scripts for concatenating PostScript 
> files? I would like to produce single PDF files from papers originally 
> written in MacWrite II (with Expressionist) or plain TeX, at a time I 
> was writing separate files for every chapter or section. I can for 
> example do MacWrite II -> MacWrite Pro -> PS -> PDF, but that would be 
> great if I could concatenate the sections together at the PS stage.

Why not convert the individual PostScript files to PDF, then
combine those as a pdfTeX job, using the  pdfpages.sty  package.

This makes much more sense conceptually, as 
 1. each PDF is generally smaller than the corresponding .ps
 2. a PDF file is well-structured as a tree, and combining
    trees is much easier than what you would need to do
    in combining PostScript Page Descriptions.

Hope this helps,

	Ross Moore
 
> I couldn't find such utility in PSUtils. The URL 
> http://www.kfki.hu/~cspeter/util/ contains a perl script "pscat" doing 
> this, but I just don't know how to operate perl on Mac OS X (or on any 
> computer, I must say). The same URL mentions another route using 
> GhostScript, but this route seems to imply converting the PS to bitmap, 
> which I wouldn't like to do.
> 
> Bruno Voisin
> 
> 
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