OmniImageFilter and .[e]ps images

[Robin Hermance-Moore]

Dear OmniWeb Afficionados,

I'm hoping someone on the list, with a better understanding of how NeXT  
Services works than I have, can shed some light on this.  I'm appealing to the  
list rather than Omni because I suspect the problem is very possibly with  
me/my site, and not a bug in their software.  Please forgive the length of  
this message....

Background:  I'm running the latest & greatest versions of OmniWeb, OmniImage  
and OmniImageFilter on a monochrome NeXTstation with NS 3.2 and 8 MB of  
memory.  I'm currently trying to create some web pages, containing software  
documentation for use by fellow developers.  I have a number of  
spreadsheet-type tables which I want to include;  these are being created by  
entering the data in Improv, then printing to a file.  This creates a .ps  
file.

For a while, I was simply including a hypertext link to the .ps file in my  
.html, like so:
  <IMG SRC="myImage.ps">
The behavior with this was very strange.  About half of the time, the image  
would be displayed correctly as an inline image (although an error panel would  
pop up first to complain about the format - I'm sorry that I can't find a  
record of what it said.)  The other half of the time, the image would not be  
displayed and the old "circle-with-a-slash-through-it" icon appeared in its  
place.  I never figured out what determined which one would occur - my system  
could have several cycles of good and bad results in a single day with nothing  
else (that I could tell) changing.  In addition, my system could be unable to  
show the images, while the person in the next office, using the same software  
off of a shared file server, was fine.

Not long ago (I believe it was actually about a week _before_ the 0.9.*  
upgrades), .ps image display stopped working for me altogether.  I started  
digging a little further and discovered that OmniImage does not support  
display of .ps (at least, the Workspace Inspector for .ps files does not show  
OmniImage as one of the tools for this file type).  


However, OmniImage does seem to support .eps files - at least OmniImage is  
shown in the Workspace Inspector panel as an option for handling this file  
type.  Thinking this could be part of my problem, I managed to use the PD  
utility bbfig to convert one of my .ps files into a .eps file.  In the  
Workspace Inspector, I set OmniImage as the default handler;  double clicking  
on the file icon now brings up OmniImage and the graphic is displayed  
successfully.

Alas, when I launch OmniWeb and try to look at the inline image (using a URL  
similar to the one above), the exact same .eps image file refuses to display.

Some additional data points:

Although OmniImage seems capable of dealing with .eps files, they are not  
listed in the Help files as supported.

Looking through the OmniImageFilter.service/services file, I see no entry for  
.eps files.  Just for grins, I copied OIF from /LocalLibrary/Services to  
~/Library/Services and added an entry (I just copied the format of the other  
entries and crossed my fingers):
  Filter: convertToTIFF
  Port: OmniImageFilter
  User Data: eps
  Send Type: NXFilenamePboardType:eps
  Return Type: NXTIFFPboardType
  Executable: OmniImageFilter
  Timeout: 30000
I ran make_services, restarted OmniWeb, and gave it a shot - no change  
(probably to be expected - I don't really know what I'm doing!)

If you can give me some pointers on things to try next, or some education on  
how the Magic of Services works, I would be very grateful!  Note that while  
I'd be happy to get .eps to display, I'd be even more delighted to see the  
original .ps files that are spit out of Improv working (this would save a step  
in the creation process).

Thanks very much,
Robin
--
Robin Hermance-Moore, Manager, Telecomm Facilities Development Section
OCLC Online Computer Library Center, Mail Stop 468
6565 Frantz Road, Dublin OH  43017-0702
rhm at oclc.org  (NeXT MaIL WeLCOME!)  614-764-6215