daVinci PostScript Interface

The output, generated by daVinci, is PostScript Level-1 code, compliant to Adobe's Document Structuring Conventions (DSC). The guidelines for document exchange in Encapsulated PostScript Format (EPSF, often called EPS) are considered, so you can load a daVinci PostScript graph in programs that support EPSF import (e.g. FrameMaker). The optional PostScript preview part (Encapsulated PostScript Interchange, EPSI) is not generated, so after importing a daVinci PostScript file into another application, you will not see the graph on the screen, but of course it will appear on paper after printing. There are third party packages to add the optional preview part to any PostScript file, for example Doug Crabill's pstoepsi, available from ftp://ftp.cs.purdue.edu/pub/dgc/pstoepsi-1.2.shar.Z.

daVinci usually places a graph on one PostScript page, regardless of the size of the graph visualization. So multi-page output for getting huge posters is not directly supported by daVinci. To split a large daVinci PostScript file on several small pages (to stick them together), you can use third party tools such as C.P. Lai's ps_poster tool, available on the daVinci ftp server: ftp://ftp.tzi.de/tzi/biss/daVinci/tools_from_3rd_party/ps_poster.tar.gz.

Notes about the daVinci PostScript interface:

1. If the PostScript scale of a graph, selected by the user in the File/Print... dialog window, is too large, then the image of the graph will not be completely visible on the page after printing. If you intend to send the PostScript file to a printer, choose the correct page size supported by the printer and press the Fit to Page button afterwards to avoid such problems.
2. The coordinates of nodes and edges in PostScript are taken from the screen representation of the graph. PostScript fonts and X-Window screen fonts may vary in character width, so for the PostScript graph it is possible that the text of a node is quite smaller than the node itself, in opposite to the screen representation. In rare cases, the text may overlap the boundary of a node.
3. Screen font "Helvetica" is always replaced by the PostScript font "HelveticaNarrow" to avoid problems with overlapping.
4. The daVinci default font "Lucida" is not a popular font in PostScript. So, the PostScript files, generated by daVinci, will always check if the current PostScript interpreter (e.g. the printer) supports "Lucida" and will use font "Helvetica" otherwise.