How to Manage PostScript Documents

There are basically three different ways of managing the PostScript versions of the lecture slides which are available on-line here. The following assumes you are using netscape(tm) on a UNIX system. For other WWW browsers and operating systems, the ideas remain the same, the syntax may change.

The default netscape behaviour on the UNIX workstations at Bendigo is to start up the ghostview program as an external viewer when the document being fetched is in PostScript format. Ghostview allows you to view the document on the screen (although it behaves a little strangely on the Mac-derived "4 sheets to a page" PostScript). From ghostview you can print the document on a PostScript printer, or you can save it to a file.
If you click (and hold down) the right mouse button on the hyperlink, instead of the left button you would normally use, you will see a drop-down menu of possible actions, one of which is to save this link to a file. You can then print the PostScript file to the printer from the command line using lpr or lp command as usual. You should probably delete the PostScript file after printing, since you can obtain it again if desired, and it only uses up valuable disk space.
You can change netscape's behaviour from its default handling of PostScript (or any other) documents using your personal .mailcap file. For example, to automatically print PostScript files using lpr on a Silicon Graphics system, add a line like:
```
	application/postscript; /usr/bsd/lpr %s
```
to a file named .mailcap in your home directory.

Phil Scott