Re: [9fans] anyone attempted to build ghostscript recently?
On Fri, May 03, 2013 at 09:08:26PM +0100, Steve Simon wrote: My need is for postscript to pcl6 for the printer we have, currently I run ghostscript under linuxemu which works but I I would prefer to have a working native port. Since I had to try to print to an HP with PCL (in fact, with HPGL embedded in PCL, with job dispatched by PJL...) I looked for a direct whatever to HPGL (there was a now nuked program in cups in the early days) or for whatever to PCL. I have not managed to get a working ghostscript combination that can be swallowed by the HP big designjet, so I have read the ghostscript sources and the cups sources. Problem: there is a mixing of PJL directly in the drivers (while PJL should be left outside for what it is: embedding printer jobs---lp level); cups uses ghostscript mainly to rasterize a PS document and then to produce PJL and PCL commands to embed this image in a job the PCL printer can eat. For the task at end, you might have more success by using the Ghostscript shipped by Plan9 to create a raw image (à la cups) and to write the filter to embed this image in PCL commands, and these in PJL (PCL and PJL are now finally documented by HP). If you have a network connected printer (or a printer connected to a bi-directional parallel port) to discover what is supported by the printer, use PJL (sh(1) example used from an Unix): #!/bin/sh # # lpd status. # LPD_OK=0 LPD_ERROR=1 LPD_FATAL=2 PJL_UEL='%-12345X' # Universal Exist Language : sentry PJL_LANGUAGE_SWITCH='E' # for printers supporting several languages # If used as a filter for lpd, it has to have something. # cat /dev/null # Opening the job. # printf '%s' $PJL_UEL # Ensure we send us something. # printf '@PJL USTATUS DEVICE=VERBOSE\n' # A custom string is echoed because there can be informations sent to # someone else for something else. This is to now this is linked to our # request. # printf '@PJL ECHO KerGIS requesting config %s\n' $(date -u '+%F %T') # If the printer does not support the category, the answer is: # # ? CRLF # FF # # Hence, we ask for everything hoping to have something... # INFO # printf '@PJL INFO ID\n' printf '@PJL INFO CONFIG\n' printf '@PJL INFO FILESYS\n' printf '@PJL INFO MEMORY\n' printf '@PJL INFO PAGECOUNT\n' printf '@PJL INFO STATUS\n' printf '@PJL INFO VARIABLES\n' printf '@PJL INFO USTATUS\n' # INQUIRE et DINQUIRE. # printf '@PJL INQUIRE PERSONALITY\n' printf '@PJL INQUIRE RESOLUTION\n' printf '@PJL INQUIRE RESOURCESAVE\n' # End of job # printf '%s' $PJL_UEL exit $LPD_OK -- Thierry Laronde tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com http://www.kergis.com/ Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C
Re: [9fans] anyone attempted to build ghostscript recently?
On Fri May 3 10:19:43 EDT 2013, st...@quintile.net wrote: Thinking of tackeling ghostscript again but failed at the first hurdle, it needs autotools to build... oh please do! one question, though. are there better alternatives than ghostscript for pdf? ghostscript usually fails for simple documents on my amd64 machine with (to me) inscrutible postscript stack traces. i find that often ghostscript also fails on linux for the same document, but e.g. evince does not. - erik
Re: [9fans] anyone attempted to build ghostscript recently?
On Fri, May 03, 2013 at 10:22:13AM -0400, erik quanstrom wrote: one question, though. are there better alternatives than ghostscript evince is a poppler frontend; poppler's problematic dependencies include glib and cmake. poppler is descended from xpdf, whose problematic dependencies are include freetype and motif, although I believe the actual pdf rendering code doesn't invoke any motif. khm
Re: [9fans] anyone attempted to build ghostscript recently?
Thinking of tackeling ghostscript again but failed at the first hurdle, it needs autotools to build... Anyone attempted this? Ghostscript 8.53 was already using autotools, but Russ Cox wrote a mkfile for it when he ported it to Plan 9. The current mkfile is already able to compile Ghostscript up to 8.63, with almost no change. However, I'm only using Ghostscript 8.56, since I wasn't able to run the following releases properly. You could probably use the current mkfile as a base and expend it. There are probably changes needed in the code that should be pushed upstream. -- David du Colombier
Re: [9fans] anyone attempted to build ghostscript recently?
On Fri, May 03, 2013 at 03:18:40PM +0100, Steve Simon wrote: Thinking of tackeling ghostscript again but failed at the first hurdle, it needs autotools to build... Plan A, create a SmallScript borrowing the rasterizing routines of METAFONT and not aiming to be a full PostScript interpreter. Plan B, get rid of PostScript altogether and use TeX and METAFONT and/or fonts available with the glyphes, and render directly from dvi to pdf, dvi to raw (image), dvi to pcl; even using virtual fonts to render approximately fonts not present with glyphes definition for previsualisation, and using dvips for direct printing to real PostScript interpreters (with embedded compliant PostScript standard fonts). Isn't there a sentence about wanting a banana, and being forced to have a Gorilla handing the banana with the whole jungle around? -- Thierry Laronde tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com http://www.kergis.com/ Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C
Re: [9fans] anyone attempted to build ghostscript recently?
...and how does that help me read a pre-existing PDF document? ---BeginMessage--- On Fri, May 03, 2013 at 03:18:40PM +0100, Steve Simon wrote: Thinking of tackeling ghostscript again but failed at the first hurdle, it needs autotools to build... Plan A, create a SmallScript borrowing the rasterizing routines of METAFONT and not aiming to be a full PostScript interpreter. Plan B, get rid of PostScript altogether and use TeX and METAFONT and/or fonts available with the glyphes, and render directly from dvi to pdf, dvi to raw (image), dvi to pcl; even using virtual fonts to render approximately fonts not present with glyphes definition for previsualisation, and using dvips for direct printing to real PostScript interpreters (with embedded compliant PostScript standard fonts). Isn't there a sentence about wanting a banana, and being forced to have a Gorilla handing the banana with the whole jungle around? -- Thierry Laronde tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com http://www.kergis.com/ Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C---End Message---
Re: [9fans] anyone attempted to build ghostscript recently?
Is a PS/PDF library something that might benefit from reconstruction in Go? Or is it just a spaghetti mess?
Re: [9fans] anyone attempted to build ghostscript recently?
What about mupdf? It has few dependecies [1] http://mupdf.com/doc/ [1] http://git.ghostscript.com/?p=mupdf.git;a=tree;f=thirdparty;hb=HEAD pmarin. On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 7:16 PM, erik quanstrom quans...@quanstro.netwrote: On Fri May 3 13:15:41 EDT 2013, knapj...@gmail.com wrote: Is a PS/PDF library something that might benefit from reconstruction in Go? Or is it just a spaghetti mess? go or c, a fresh implementation might be an improvement, and given the weight of some of the other options, might be more time-efficient than one would think. - erik
Re: [9fans] anyone attempted to build ghostscript recently?
On May 3, 2013, at 12:16 PM, erik quanstrom quans...@quanstro.net wrote: On Fri May 3 13:15:41 EDT 2013, knapj...@gmail.com wrote: Is a PS/PDF library something that might benefit from reconstruction in Go? Or is it just a spaghetti mess? go or c, a fresh implementation might be an improvement, and given the weight of some of the other options, might be more time-efficient than one would think. There are several somewhat portable pdf rendering libraries out there. Some with mostly C and a little sprinkling of C++ (like mupdf.com). If we had a Javascript interpreter and support or SVG then https://wiki.mozilla.org/PDF.js might be an option once that group irons out the kinks. -jas
Re: [9fans] anyone attempted to build ghostscript recently?
On Fri, May 03, 2013 at 09:14:18AM -0800, Jack Johnson wrote: Is a PS/PDF library something that might benefit from reconstruction in Go? Or is it just a spaghetti mess? Whatever the way (porting existing to Go or writing from scratch), a Go version would be an improvement against a C++ one with gigabytes of dependencies. This may be (partly) achievable with a PDF library, I doubt something like Ghostscript is achievable (and I even wonder if that makes sense to reimplement a full PostScript interpreter). The problem is: if this is just to render documents created on Plan9, a minimum is required, but one could get rid entirely of PostScript or PDF. If this is to view an external PDF document, or to render an external PS document, that may use the latest version (for PDF) or a lot of features (for PS), you're skrewed. But in this case, there are probably online PDF viewers... -- Thierry Laronde tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com http://www.kergis.com/ Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C
Re: [9fans] anyone attempted to build ghostscript recently?
But in this case, there are probably online PDF viewers... But no Plan 9 browsers. -- Aram Hăvărneanu
Re: [9fans] anyone attempted to build ghostscript recently?
On Fri, May 03, 2013 at 08:10:26PM +0200, Aram H?v?rneanu wrote: But in this case, there are probably online PDF viewers... But no Plan 9 browsers. Yes... But this is also why, concurrently, work has to be done to get rid of some unnecessities: that documents produced on Plan9 be viewable on Plan9 with only Plan9 means (external documents are another problem). And this is why I prefer TeX other *roff: not because of some religious war; but because TeX is a whole system, including fonts and mean to make them, and there is a shortest path to full autonomy. (And this is why kerTeX will still produce DVI, even with extensions, and not directly PDF.) What would be fun would be a... PDF to DVI converter (because it will mean a huge part of dropping features---/dev/null is something I can not do without.) -- Thierry Laronde tlaronde +AT+ polynum +dot+ com http://www.kergis.com/ Key fingerprint = 0FF7 E906 FBAF FE95 FD89 250D 52B1 AE95 6006 F40C
Re: [9fans] anyone attempted to build ghostscript recently?
Yes... But this is also why, concurrently, work has to be done to get rid of some unnecessities: that documents produced on Plan9 be viewable on Plan9 with only Plan9 means (external documents are another problem). ghostscript already renders plan 9 produced pdf just fine. so that problem is solved, and there's no need to do anything. what we need is better access to externally produced documents. - erik
Re: [9fans] anyone attempted to build ghostscript recently?
On Fri, May 3, 2013 at 10:38 AM, erik quanstrom quans...@labs.coraid.comwrote: Yes... But this is also why, concurrently, work has to be done to get rid of some unnecessities: that documents produced on Plan9 be viewable on Plan9 with only Plan9 means (external documents are another problem). ghostscript already renders plan 9 produced pdf just fine. so that problem is solved, and there's no need to do anything. what we need is better access to externally produced documents. So, skipping interactivity, what about a pdf2pdf filter? -Jack
Re: [9fans] anyone attempted to build ghostscript recently?
Russ Cox wrote a mkfile for it when he ported it to Plan 9. thanks, yes I looked at ghostscript a year or two ago but they seem to have changed their directory layout and modifying the mkfile was not straightforward. My need is for postscript to pcl6 for the printer we have, currently I run ghostscript under linuxemu which works but I I would prefer to have a working native port. I will try again. -Steve
