Distillery is a PostScript program for taking another PostScript program, and converting it so that it complies with the Adobe document structuring conventions (DSC). The advantage of this is that individual pages can be accessed randomly, without requiring all previous pages to be processed in order to correctly determine the state of the machine.

Distillery was originally written by Glenn Reid when he worked for Adobe Systems Inc., and was freely distributed by that company. Its original intention was to provide a more compact document as well as conforming to DSC. Unfortunately, several assumptions were made that reduced the reliability of the conversion, and there were a number of bugs.

Adobe no longer wish to support this product, especially as it only provides for Level 1 PostScript. I have fixed the bugs that I could identify, and I am making it generally available under the name "distillery" to avoid confusing this version with the original (still.ps), and to satisfy Adobe Systems request that a new name be used.

Although Distillery is now reasonably robust, there are some situations which it cannot handle. You would need to check that the output is the same as the input, particularly if proprietary fonts are used or if illustrations created using "xfig" containing patterns are included.

The April 2005 release compresses all images using LZW encoding to reduce file size, and is able to take as input image data represented as a stream, such as RLE encoded. It also accepts image or imagemask calls with parameters in a dictionary rather as separate items on the stack.
The May 2005 release ensures that each page starts with a colour space specification, allowing EPS files to be distilled.
The September 2005 release corrects a spelling mistake introduced in May in handling the "image" operator.
The December 2006 release revises font handling to be much more robust. Outline fonts are now handled correctly. Type 1 fonts containing "eexec" can now be handled. A minor error introduced in April 2005 in how colours are handled has been corrected.
The February 2007 release handles Type 3 fonts which use "show" or "charpath" operators in a BuildChar procedure. Previously, these could cause an infinite loop which resulted in distillery crashing.

Distillery may be obtained from our FTP machine. The instructions on its use are within the program.

Mail to Graham Freeman

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