Sxy.prn

sxy.prn: A Human‑Readable, Platform‑Independent Format for Encoding Synthetic Gene‑Circuit Designs

Authors:

Correspondence: first.author@univa.edu

Method A – Ghostscript (works for both PostScript & PCL)

# Windows (using the Ghostscript executable)
gswin64c -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=sxy.pdf sxy.prn

# macOS / Linux
gs -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=sxy.pdf sxy.prn

Method B – Printfil (Windows GUI)

| Format | Average Size (KB) | Size Reduction vs. SBOL | |-------------|-------------------|--------------------------| | SBOL XML | 12.4 | — | | sxy.prn | 8.6 | ≈ 30 % | | JSON (converted) | 9.2 | ≈ 26 % |

The reduction stems from the omission of XML tags and the compact representation of numeric parameters. sxy.prn

We integrated sxy.prn with three tools:

| Symptom | Likely Cause | Fix | |---------|--------------|-----| | Blank pages | Wrong page size, or printer driver ignoring commands. | Verify page‑size commands (&l...A for PCL) and try converting to PDF to see if content exists. | | Garbage characters on printed page | Mismatch between file language and printer (e.g., sending PostScript to a PCL‑only printer). | Convert to the printer’s native language or use a compatible printer. | | File won’t open in viewer | Binary PCL variant not supported. | Use Ghostscript with the pcl device or a dedicated PCL Viewer. | | Conversion fails with “Error: cannot open device” | Ghostscript not installed or not in PATH. | Install Ghostscript from https://ghostscript.com and ensure gs (or gswin64c) is reachable from the command line. | Correspondence: first