Validating a Postscript without trying to print it?

Question

Saving data to Postscript in my app results in a Postscript file which I can view without issues in GhostView, but when I try to print it, the printer isn't able to print it because it seems to be invalid.

Is there a way to validate / find errors in Postscript files without actually sending it to a printer? Preferred would be some kind of Java API/library, but a program which does the same would be fine as well.

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Edit #1 : no I don't know why it's invalid, nor even necessarily if it's invalid, but would like to be able to validate it outside of ghostview, or figure out what's going on when it can't print.

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Answer : Well using the ps2ps trick I was able to see the output that Postscript does and there check the difference. The difference was that I am not allowed to have a decimal number for the width or height of images in the Postscript, but rather only integers. So I still didn't find a way to validate, but this way was good enough for my problem. Thanks.

Answer 1

Whenever I need to validate a PostScript file using Ghostscript without having to actually look at its rendered page images I use the "nullpage" device:

gswin32c ^
   -sDEVICE=nullpage ^
   -dNOPAUSE ^
   -dBATCH ^
   c:/path/to/file/to/be/validated.pdf-or-ps ^
   1>validated.stdout ^
   2>validated.stderr

In case of a problem, there will be a non-zero %errorlevel% set, and the validated.stderr logfile will contain all the messages Ghostscript spit out during rendering.

Answer 2

Do you know why it's invalid?

My suggestion would have been to feed it to Ghostscript/Ghostvoiew, but given Ghostview can view it, it would seem that at least some interpreters think it is valid Postscript.

So it may be something specific to your printer - either it's picky about something in the PS that Ghostscript allows, or it's accessing something that doesn't exist on your printer (filesystem, perhaps) or exceeding some limit of memory, or...

The point being that it may not be an erroneous PS program and so a library/API to validate it might not help

Edit: Does any of it print? Have you tried a printer from a different manufacturer (or vendor of Postscript interpreter, anyway). Does Ghostview give/log any warnings or errors?

Where (what application) does the document originate from?

Can you generate other instances of the document? (e.g. a really simple/empty one to see if that also gives errors)

Unless there's an API providing access to the specific interpreter that's used in your printer, I think you are validating it against another PS interpreter (Ghostscript).

Since there aren't that many PS clones in the world, getting access to another non-GS based one probably isn't going to be easy

Edit2: This link (if quite old information) gives information about how to get more details from your printer on the error: http://www.quite.com/ps/errors.htm

Answer 3

If you can see it on ghostview, it means ghostscript can parse it.

So, one trick you could try using to print (but not to actually validate) your file would be to use ghostscript's postscript output mode (there is a wrapper called ps2ps for it, which mainly adds -sDEVICE=pswrite; there is also ps2ps2 which uses -sDEVICE=ps2write).