Update ps export to allow text as text objects rather than glyph

[durack1]

Currently the *.ps export does not export text objects as text types, rather these are glyphs which are not recognized by vector image editing software to allow direct text editing.

Please update to allow text objects as text

[durack1]

It appears the *.pdf does export text as text objects (checked in Illustrator), so we're close

[doutriaux1]

@scottwittenburg I wonder i it's because of ghostscript?

[doutriaux1]

@scottwittenburg the vcs' psotscript dunction has:

    def postscript(self, file, mode='r', orientation=None,
                   width=None, height=None, units='inches', textAsPaths=True):

Did you get rid of textAsPath when switch to contextGL ?

[scottwittenburg]

@doutriaux1 I suspect what you suggested was true, that it's due to how we have to use ghostscript now in order to support saving a postscript. The only way I think we could support textAsPaths is if there's a command-line option available in ghostscript. Maybe we should remove that argument in that case?

[durack1]

Folks from memory textAsPaths is exactly what we don't want, as if this is selected the text is converted into glyphs which often bloats out file sizes considerably (as each vector element needs to be defined) rather than just having an ascii character represented in the file (and the screen).

I remember working with @dlonie (who seems to have deleted his github account) on this and note there are a bunch of now old and closed issues buried in other repos
CDAT/cdat#1013
CDAT/cdat#517
CDAT/cdat#1077
CDAT/vcs#47
etc

[scottwittenburg]

@durack1 Is illustrator something I can use for free?

[scottwittenburg]

@durack1 Do you know of another tool (besides Illustrator which is not free) I can use to get a better feel for what ghostscript is producing from our pdfs, compared to what we want it to produce?

[durack1]

@scottwittenburg try https://inkscape.org/

[scottwittenburg]

Thanks @durack1, will do.