Dark Artistry

I was tasked to write some Pitney Bowes Streamweaver code for Adobe ES produced postscript. It has been an interesting adventure as I am new to postscript and Streamweaver. I must side step the politics and get to the meat of it. So, I need to take 30k – give or take – letters with form attachments, etc. and save money. To do this the first step is too duplex. Sure, easy enough. The other savings is to group letters by address by envelope, an envelope holds seven pages. Sounds easy.

Well, the problem I have with proprietary products are the lack of examples, vague documentation, and nothing to reference on the internet. This is great for training and consulting dollars for them, but it is a waste of fucking time and money for everyone else, as you likely already know. This led me to write this in C# out of frustration in order to figure out how their product worked and to understand postscript structure.

So, I got Streamweaver working with very little code, but I also have all this C# code that adds blank pages to odd page counts for duplex reflections, sorts and merges the correspondence by address to fit into a standard envelope, and code that interrogates if the postscript is even correct in the first place! I was getting a lot of bad postscript that wasn’t very visible in Streamweaver.

I decided these might be useful command line tools. I’ll be getting these written, packaged up, and released soon. They will be free, open, and likely under the Apache 2 license. I will write them for Linux (C++ or Perl), Mac (Swift or Objective-C), and Windows (Mono C#). These will work on Adobe standard postscript.