Turning a PostScript file into HL7

Homepage Clovertech Forums Read Only Archives Cloverleaf Cloverleaf Turning a PostScript file into HL7

  • Creator
    Topic
  • #49510
    Jaye Costello
    Participant

      Does anyone have any experience with taking a PostScript record and turning it into a HL7 message?  We have a vendor who is only delivering PostScript documents and we have to get them to another vendor who will only accept HL7.

    Viewing 2 reply threads
    • Author
      Replies
      • #62260
        Russ Ross
        Participant

          About 14 years ago I wrote applications that created postscript files so let me comment about postscript right quick.

          Postscript is a programming language designed to be device independent, whereas something like PCL is another popular language specific to HP printers.

          So think of a postscript file as a standalone script that gets interpreted by the printer’s postscript driver at run time when you print the postscript file.

          This may not be news to you but it is worth knowing because that means it is likely each post script file will have enough variation that parsing it to obtain the desired information could be challenging.

          I would equate it to screen scraping from a screen that might keep changing the layout on you.

          If possible I suggest investigating getting a copy of the data before it is stored in the postscript file.

          When I did write applications to dynamically write postscript files a very useful tool I used in that endeavor was called ghostscript (probably the GNU version but it was too long ago for me to clearly remember).

          Ghostscript allowed me to display my postscript files to the screen instead of to a printer which helped shorten my development effort.

          I find what you are considering to be very interesting but would have to fry too many brain cells to offer any more help at this time.

          Good luck and it will be interesting to hear how it goes.

          Russ Ross
          RussRoss318@gmail.com

        • #62261
          Rob Abbott
          Keymaster

            Extracting the text may get you halfway.  There are still issues:

            http://www.postscript.org/FAQs/language/node36.html

            This tool might help:

            http://www.nzdl.org/html/prescript.html

            http://www.google.com/search?source=ig&hl=en&q=postscript+to+text+converter&btnG=Google+Search

            I would echo Russ by suggesting you get the data before it’s encoded.  Good luck!

            Rob Abbott
            Cloverleaf Emeritus

          • #62262
            frans de Wet
            Participant

              Perhaps ps2txt?

          Viewing 2 reply threads
          • The forum ‘Cloverleaf’ is closed to new topics and replies.