Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!mcvax!ukc!etive!lfcs!jcb
From: jcb@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Julian Bradfield)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.postscript
Subject: Re: Why does this lose?
Summary: showpage may be a procedure
Message-ID: <650@etive.ed.ac.uk>
Date: 15 Aug 88 22:53:52 GMT
References: 
Sender: news@etive.ed.ac.uk
Reply-To: jcb@lfcs.ed.ac.uk (Julian Bradfield)
Organization: Laboratory for the Foundations of Computer Science, Edinburgh U
Lines: 17

In article  hobbit@topaz.rutgers.edu (*Hobbit*) writes:
>The following is an attempt to print pages in "four-up" mode, four little
>frames per real page, with appropriate reduction and such.  This is raw
>postscript, not something you plug into your favorite text formatter.  The
>bit Q here is: Why does it fail?!  The error comes at the indicated "show",
>which wimps out claiming "invalidaccess".  Does it have something to do
>with redefining showpage?  What's with it?  The manual tells me nothing about
>why "show" would fail this way; usually when I shove a string on the stack,

I don't know whether this is anything to do with your problem, but be
warned that (in some environments, at least---in my case, Apple
Laserwriter with various DVIPS stuff downloaded)  showpage  is not an
operator, but is a procedure defined in  userdict , which calls the
 showpage  operator (found in  systemdict ). Since  bind  doesn't do
anything to names that are associated with procedures, if you have
this setup, to redefine  showpage  you need to do something like
/realshowpage /showpage load def