OmniImageFilter and .[e]ps images

[Robin Hermance-Moore]

Hi there!  I sent this out a week ago, and have gotten no responses at all.  I'm  
sending it again in case it got lost.  Would someone please confirm for me that you  
get it?  If you've seen this before, sorry for the trouble.
Thanks, Robin
===============================================================

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