Printing .prn files on Mac.

Your lecturer should be flogged with a wet noodle to within an inch of his life. .prn files are an artifact of MS-DOS. Everyone that I have seen is a plain text file. Open the file with Text Edit or some other text editor. You may find it convenient to change the extension to .txt. Examine the contents to be sure that its contents are indeed plain text. If the files are gibberish, then very politely ask your lecturer for a .doc or .pdf version of his notes. Then go to the supermarket and buy a bag of pasta, bring it home, and start boiling water.

I agree that the professor is a dillweed for posting a prn file instead of pdf or something more universally understood.

I'm guessing that the ".prn" files he's created are actually PostScript since he's wanted you to use Ghostview to view them. You can verify this by opening them in TextEdit and looking for ASCII text and somewhere near the top, you'll see the phrase "postscript" (unsure of the exact case).

If so, check this post and be sure to read the comments for more info. It should be pretty easy to get the PS into a PDF.

I've used ps2pdf in the past, but you need fink installed to do that.

EDIT: Try "pstopdf" from the commandline on OS X -- it's installed by default. It sounds like it's not flawless for some of the advanced PS rendering, but may work just fine for your doc.

Mike

micsaund said:

... It should be pretty easy to get the PS into a PDF. ...

Click to expand...

If the file is PostScript, then all you have to do is to change the extension from .prn to .ps. Preview will handle the rest.