[10443] in Athena Bugs
dvi2ps errors to stdout
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Mark Rosenstein)
Mon Apr 12 14:09:06 1993
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 14:09:00 -0400
From: Mark Rosenstein <mar@MIT.EDU>
To: bugs@Athena.MIT.EDU
When dvi2ps gets an error parsing it's arguments, it writes the
message to stdout instead of stderr. This is a problem since it is
commonly invoked as "dvi2ps | lpr". The error message occurs as the
first line of it's output, so that lpr does not see this as postscript
and instead prints the text of the postscript program.
-Mark
From: kiwi@Athena.MIT.EDU
To: suggest@Athena.MIT.EDU
Date: Mon, 12 Apr 93 13:57:50 EDT
Hi!
I had a problem with printing a LaTeX file the other day because I used the
-z option (zephyr message when printing is finished). I had not used this
option before and I put it in the wrong place in the command line, ie.:
dvi2ps -r -z filename | lpr -h -Ppicus
Rather than
dvi2ps -r filename | lpr -h -z -Ppicus
I got 79 pages of unintelligible output rather than 12 pages of latex
document.
I think it is confusing to have options both before and after the pipe,
especially if some of the options do bad things if they are typed in the
wrong place. My suggestion is to rewrite the command line format so that
the options are all on one side. If that is not possible, then adding a
flag to prevent the computer misunderstanding a misplaced option (ie.
ignore -z if before pipe) would help.
Thanks very much. This would help save paper and time for others making the
same mistake.
James Melhuish
