Sun Screen Images in PostScript for Documentation

[Vincent J Guinto]

I need help and advice for doing the following:

I want to display some color graphics in windows on a Sun workstation,
then capture some portion of the screen (particular windows is sufficient,
random chunks of the screen would be fantastic), dump this portion of the
screen into a raster file, convert it to standard PostScript format, and
insert the PostScript figure into a troff document on a UNIX* mainframe.

I need something that will work on both Sun 3 and Sun 4 workstations
(SPARC stations).

I know I can do the following: save a Sun 3 screendump in a raster file,
use "rasfilter8to1" to convert color to black&white, then use "pssun" to
convert the raster file into PostScript. This is fine, but we're going
over to Sun 4 SPARC stations, and we also need greater precision than
using entire screen dumps.

I have the following questions:

1. do rasfilter8to1 and pssun commands still function in the same way on
Sun 4s as on Sun 3s? (i.e., will the procedure I described above still
work on a Sun 4?)

2. Specifically, there is doubt here that the pssun command still works
for Sun 4 - is it still available, or is there an easily-obtainable
replacement that does the same thing? (by easily obtainable, I mean
something that I can get my hands on in a couple weeks - whether bought or
public domain doesn't matter much) - something that is part of the
standard Sun software release would be fantastic!

3. has anyone used a program called "acquire"? It captures either windows,
full screens, or randomly- boxed pieces of the screen into raster files.
We currently have this software running on Sun 3s, but are unsure if it
works on Sun 4s. We also don't know what company provided this program,
how to check on technical support, or how reliable the software is in
general.

4. are there other programs readily available that will capture windows
and pieces of the screen in raster files? If so, what are they and how do
I get them?

5. has anyone ever used FrameMaker on the Sun to capture screen images and
insert them into documents?  Is FrameMaker output PostScript, encapsulated
PS, or something else? If output is PostScript, can FrameMaker be used to
do all three steps I need to do (capture screen segment, convert to
black&white, and convert to PostScript) in a way that can be inserted into
a troff document?

6. is anyone familiar with the Eroff package sold by Elan? It supposedly
allows you to insert Sun raster files directly into troff-compatible
documents. Does anyone use it, and does it work as well as it sounds like
it does?

I should point out that I'm very much a novice working with Suns - I don't
even have one of my own yet! But these issues must be resolved quickly -
they are needed for doing technical documentation of at least three
products that are under development now! Please keep any responses as
clear and basic as possible - and please don't make suggestions for
patching any existing software or writing our own (we have neither time
nor expertise at our disposal to do programming - it's just us tech
writers)!

If you know of any products that we could buy to do what we need, a
company name would be most appreciated, and a contact name and number
would be great!

[and no, we DO NOT want to use FrameMaker to do all of our document
generation/formatting - troff is a REQUIREMENT that we cannot, and do not
want to, get around!]

Thanks very much for any responses! Email directly to me if you can, or
else post. I'll try to summarize the email responses at a future date if I
get anything useful that way.

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Vince Guinto                   614-860-6254
AT&T Bell Laboratories         att!cblph!vjg
Columbus, OH                   vjg at cblph.att.com
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