How to "combine" postscript files?
 

Hi there...

I've a postscript file with slides and I need to create another file with the slides (3 per page) and some lines to write notes. In "a picture", I have:

+----+
|XXX|
|..s1..|
|XXX|
+----+

+----+
|XXX|
|..s2..|
|XXX|
+----+

+----+
|XXX|
|..s3..|
|XXX|
+----+

And I need something like

+----+
|s1....|
|s2....|
|s3....|
+----+

I know about the pstops command, which allows me to combine pages from the same file (so, eventually, I will succeed to put 3 slides per page)... but, how can I do the other "column" with lines for notes? Unfortunately just printing the presentation and then using "pen+ruler+make copies" is not possible, since I need the result in .ps (or pdf) format. Probably I can also do the work by manipulating my .tex file, so I could put lines in the even-slides... but I think there should be a better solution. Does anyone know it?

Thank you very much in advance...

Look at the ImageMagick pagkage, particularly its compose program.

compose will accept .txt files containing notes and treat them as slides, as well as postscript files and many other graphics formats. You can probably just lay out the slides four per page, with one .txt file for each third slide (give the filenames in the order you want them to appear, with one .txt for each fourth page).

To save yourself some hastle, you probably want to set the paper size in TeX to be just big enough to hold each graphics slide (or use ps2ps to crop them); and it would probably be easier to \include{} the txt files in TeX rather than using compose (at least then you can use decent formatting).

Or you could convert them to EPS and then use LaTeX with \includegraphics (from the graphics package) to lay out each page.