Post-processing ps.map output with inkscape Re: [GRASS-user] problems with ps.map outputs

[Francesco Mirabella]

Hi all,
just to say that inkscape can import Sketch files (.sk extension) and 
these can be derived from a ps.map .ps output by pstoedit.

->$ pstoedit -f sk   file.ps   file.sk

->$ inkscape file.sk


hope it helps

Francesco



Tom Russo wrote:
> On Thu, Aug 14, 2008 at 03:49:37PM +0200, we recorded a bogon-computron collision of the <tutey at o2.pl> flavor, containing:
>> Tom Russo pisze:
>>> <hamish_b at yahoo.com> wrote:
> [on alternatives to Adobe Illustrator for tweaking ps.map output]
>>>> How about Inkscape or Scribus?
>>>>   http://www.inkscape.org/
>>>>   http://www.scribus.net/
>>> Both of these are cool programs, and if one could get ps.map's output into
>>> them they'd be great choices for tweaking map presentation.  But neither is 
>>> actually able to import a PDF (or even PostScript) map for editing.
>>>
> [...]
>>> Inkscape can do a great deal with the graphics if you can get the data 
>>> imported.  But it can't read PDFs or postscript directly.  
> [...]
>>> Have you actually had success with either of these programs?
>> Tom,
>>
>> I also had problem with Inkscape in past, but I just checked 0.46 stock
>> Debian testing package and it rocks now. See my previous message in the
>> thread.
> 
> Indeed!  This is greatly improved from last time I tried it.  Inkscape can't
> read raw postscript, but can now import pdf better than it used to be 
> able to do last time I tried it.  I was able to do a ps2pdf of a map I'd 
> created previously from ps.map and import it into inkscape very nicely.  
> Interestingly, it was better to do ps2pdf on the raw output of ps.map than it 
> was to do a ps2ps first --- the "simplified" postscript from ps2ps turned all 
> of my text into individual glyphs for each letter instead of turning them into 
> text objects that could be edited in inkscape nicely.
> 
> There are some odd and annoying artifacts:
>   1) All of my text imports oddly formatted, with inter-letter spacing all 
>      messed up.  All it took to fix this was to ungroup everything until I 
>      could select the individual text objects, then edit the text (adding a 
>      space and deleting it was sufficient) and click "Apply" --- this fixed 
>      all the spacing, but the net effect was that I'd told inkscape to make a 
>      null change to the actual text.  Nothing else I tried forced it to 
>      re-adjust the text spacing properly.  
> 
>   2) None of the grid lines I'd created with ps.map's "grid" function showed 
>      up.  The were all hidden in there as paths with no fill.  I was able to 
>      fix them by opening the "XML Editor" and clicking every path in the list 
>      until I started seeing my invisible grid lines --- each path after that 
>      was another piece of my grid, and I could set the fill on each one to 
>      something useful.  But short of editing the XML I was unable to get 
>      the grid lines selected through the drawing panel until they were filled.
> 
> Even with these annoyances, this still gave me something I could edit nicely 
> --- my primary use for this kind of thing will be to fix up the hideous 
> labeling that ps.map is capable of, since inkscape can allow me to "put text 
> on path" for any arbitrarily shaped path better than v.label can do with it's 
> "curve text to lines" feature.
> 
> In all, this was a very nice surprise, since I tried inkscape only a few
> months ago and had found it impossible to import ps.map output then.
> Thanks for the nudge.
> 


-- 
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Francesco Mirabella, PhD
Geologia Strutturale e Geofisica
Universita' di Perugia,
Dipartimento di Scienze della Terra,
Piazza Universita' 1, 06100 Perugia (Italy)
tel: ++39.(0)75.586.7182
fax: ++39.(0)75.585.2603
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