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Oh, and is a GPLed implementation of PS, but (AFAIK) you won't find that on an actual printer.

Off-topic side note that I was reminded of when I was thinking of Ghostscript... Artifex quietly dropped their MuPDF GPL infringement suit against Palm a while back. There was a lot of reporting on the original suit, but nobody seems to have paid attention to the outcome. Apparently, Artifex found out that they can't actually license code under the GPL, but then impose additional restrictions on it (like require money) when a big company uses their GPL code.

Re the supposed GPL violation, the mailing list post linked to from the article doesn't make a lot of sense to me.

We do not consider bundling as an integrated component intended to work with other software as "mere aggregation" under the GPL.

This seems nutty to me. As far as I understand, there's never been any prohibition on simply loading GPL software onto a machine that has a proprietary OS and other proprietary apps.

The GNU GPL and our own "AFPL" license which explictly disallows commercial distribution.

Huh? This is just plain wrong.

I'd thought Google would be doing that by now. I've been implementing something that has to read arbitrary web pages (see SiteTruth) and extract data, and I've been considering how to deal with JavaScript effectively.

Conceptually, it's not that hard. You need a skeleton of a browser, one that can load pages and run Javascript like a browser, builds the document tree, but doesn't actually draw anything. You load the page, run the initial OnLoad JavaScript, then look at the document tree as it exists at that point. Firefox could probably be coerced into doing this job.

It's also possible to analyze Flash files. Text which appears in Flash output usually exists as clear text in the Flash file. Again, the most correct approach is to build a psuedo-renderer, one that goes through the motions of processing the file and executing the ActionScript, but just passes the text off for further processing, rather than rendering it.

Ghostscript had to deal with this problem years ago, because PostScript is actually a programming language, not a page description language. It has variables, subroutines, and an execution engine. You have to run PostScript programs to find out what text out.

OCR is also an option. Because of the lack of serious font support in HTML, most business names are in images. I've been trying OCR on those, and it usually works if the background is uncluttered.

Sooner or later, everybody who does serious site-scraping is going to have to bite the bullet and implement the heavy machinery to do this. Try some other search engines. Somebody must have done this by now.

Again, I'm surprised that Google hasn't done this. They went to the trouble to build parsers for PDF and Microsoft Word files; you'd think they'd do "Web 2.0" documents.

Thanks for that! Just updated settings on my system. BUT, I woul dlove to have a lightweight (i.e. small and quick-to-load) alternative to Adobe Acrobat for viewing (and printing) PDF files. I'e grown accustomed to some of the quirks of the user interface, my main complaint with Acrobat is its slow startup speed. That, and at least on my system, Acrobat 6.0 has a working set of about 35 MB. (As reported by sysinternals.com's amazingly powerful Process Explorer utility.

I did some cursory googling a week or so ago, but couldn't find what I was looking for. It looks like ghostscript might be useful for this? Has anyone tried it?

As far as I know, Apple never shipped a Forth interpreter with Mac system software (although Power Macs around 10 years later did include one as part of Open Firmware, used during booting only).

A couple of years after Mac's introduction, Apple certainly did ship a complete Smalltalk environment for 68K Macs, as did several third party vendors.

PostScript was never part of the MacOS imaging model (and with OS X, still isn't) and in any case did not arrive on the scene for a year after 'the first Mac'. Once the LaserWriter shipped, the printer driver gained a primitive PS generator for the Mac's QuickDraw model.

(Much later, some imagesetter vendors and preflighting/soft proofing applications, and Ghostscript, of course, included PostScript implementations for specialised purposes. Even Adobe's graphic arts applications did not embed anything approaching a full PostScript implementation until quite recently.)

Here's the The Adobe PDF reference, for if you want to implement applications that use PDF. In particular, you might want to read Section 1.5 of the PDF Reference, "Intellectual Property". In summary, it says that they'll enforce their copyright on the PDF specification in order to keep the standard accurate, but grant you the right to implement the standard pretty much however you like.

Some apps that do so, without licensing the Adobe PDf libraries or tools, include:

GhostScript
OpenOffice.org
Scribus
Mac OS X
(specifically the window system, print system, and Preview tool) ... and *LOTS* more, including evince, xpdf, kpdf, libpoppler, and other open source PDF viewing tools/libs, several reporting libraries like ReportLab, etc.

Hmm. The only problem I've run into converting PS to PDF with GS was the ugly-font problem caused by using the tex--dvips--ps2pdf workflow; this was fixed by just using pdftex.

What are you feeding to GhostScript? Though it might be a pain for you to do so, I encourage you to hop on over to http://bugs.ghostscript.com/ and file a bug, with testcases and such, if one hasn't been filed already.

It's never been a problem for me, but I've only fed it particular types of files. I would be curious to know what "serious" PDF work is, so I don't run into the same problems you have.

--grendel drago

After all, why would they want to increase the possibility of someone reverse-engineering the PDF format and writing free/open source Acrobat production applications, when they're currently selling about seven of them, and all for a hefty chunk of change?

Except, of course, that there is no need at all to reverse-engineer the PDF format, since the full PDF specifications are available for download from Adobe, free of charge. And since there are oodles of open-source software that will write PDF.

Regards, Felix!

You can use GhostWriter (based on ghostscript) to print to PDF from any windows application (inluding MS Office). I run it on my work XP laptop and it is very easy to use.

I tried to find a link for GhostWriter but couldnt see anything obvious. It is related to GhostView\GSView so it's a good start.

Why not give some more information so we can figure out why it doesn't work?

Why not check out Ghostscript and see for yourself?

It's always possible it's a source bug, but we've only ever had minor trouble on ancient vendor unix compilers.

as well as a severely diminished motive to improve its myriad shortcomings compared to commercial software

Ghostscript is commercial software. The company which produces it is called Art Of Code LLC. Have a nice day.

-- Jamie

Ghostscript is painfully slow under some situations.

Check this out:

http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=686919

They are improving it, however.

David

(So basically, from my testing, it looks like ghostscript makes HUGE postscript files which it then sends to the printer, and takes much longer because the files are so huge).

I feel exactly the same way. I gave up and used LPRng instead, but I still have not got postscript printing working properly with one printer.

totally unrelated to the topic at hand, but since you brought it up: there is a gpl pdf reader available from: http://www.ghostscript.com/doc/AFPL/get813.htm If you're not runing *nix, it has been ported to Windows quite well, also available on the above page. ps: doesn't adobe acrobat=mud dancer? I use ghostview/script on windows, mainly because it isn't as resource intensive and seems to handle damaged pdf much better than the mud dancer...

• The Bat! mail client (shareware)
• Opera browser/mail/newsclient (adware), much more lightweight than Mozilla
• 40tude Dialog newsclient
• Total Commander file manager (shareware)
• eMule peer-to-peer client (open source)
• ViM
• editor (open source)
• GhostScript and GSView for PostScript and PDF rendering/conversion/manipulation (open source)
• ActivePerl, ActivePython, ActiveTcl for scripting
• 7-zip packer

These are some of the free (speech or beer) software I'd install on a family, non-gaming machine:

• Web Browser: Mozilla or Mozilla Firebird
• E-mail: Mozilla (cross-platform), Mozilla Thunderbird (cross-platform), Evolution (Gnome), or KMail (KDE)
• Office Suite: OpenOffice.org
• Media Player: QuickTime (Windows), Zinf (cross-platform), RealPlayer (cross-platform), WinAmp (Windows), MPlayer (Windows), XMMS (Linux)
• Image Viewer: IrfanView (Windows)
• Instant Messaging: Gaim (cross-platform)
• Personal Information Management: Palm Desktop Software (great PIM suite even if you don't own a Palm)
• Other: Acrobat Reader (although I'm weary of their DRM), Java 2 Runtime Environment, Macromedia Flash and Shockwave players, Ad-Aware (spyware remover for Windows), ZoneAlarm, Sygate Personal Firewall (firewall, alternative to ZoneAlarm), Grisoft AVG Anti-Virus, FileZilla, WinRAR (not free, shareware with nag window), Ofoto desktop software (basic photo album and touch-ups, even if you don't use Ofoto's online services)

Some other software I'd install on my own desktop (dev), in decreasing order of importance:

• Cygwin, bascially all packages
• UltraEdit32 (45-day trial shareware)
• TightVNC
• Ghostscript and GSView
• Java 2 SDK
• Eclipse
• Borland JBuilder Personal
• ActiveState Perl, Python, Tcl/Tk (yes, even though they are in Cygwin), Jython
• GIMP
• POV-Ray
• At least one of Apache, Tomcat, or Plone (Zope)
• HTTrack (a website copier)

--

So let's see, there's Linus, the whole BK mess, Miguel de Icaza, etc. Do you write GPL software? Do you fear you're next? You are, if you're successfull and you don't play nice with the FSF.

The Artifex license is not the point of contention, here. The Free version of Ghostscript is (and I believe always has been) GPLed. For more on the actual disagreement, see here (and its followups): http://www.ghostscript.com/pipermail/gs-devel/2002 -December/002261.html

Install Ghostscript and Gimp-Print, and you should be fine. My Stylus Color 760 works beautifully.

For those who aren't aware, Carl Worth and Keith Packard's Xr library (the link is pretty stale, sorry) works with the X Render extension to provide a really nice 2D rendering model. They've done some cutting-edge work here, including high-quality anti-aliased compositing, high-speed rendering, high-quality splines, and a Postscript-like C API. Postscript/PDF and SVG support is an explicit goal of Xr: xpdf has already been modified to render with Xr (and Xft), and it looks great!

Watch for an upcoming announcement soon, when the project is sufficiently complete.

You could use GhostScript.

And if the authors had used pdfTeX, their PDF would actually be readle on-screen.

Now, I'm not condoning this ridiculous activation scheme by any means. However, there is a fairly simple way to print from work and/or keep archival copies without needing TT installed either at work or in the future. People with a unix/linux background might be familiar with postscript files. These are files generated by an application program that are ready to go to the printer. If you need to print again at a later date, just bang the postscript file to the printer. No need to even fire up the application. Sound good? Well, you can use these in Windoze too. Simply install a new printer driver. My favorite for this purpose is the Apple Laserwriter II NT (an old postscript-only laser printer). When windoze asks what port it's attached to, answer "FILE:", meaning when you print to it, windoze will prompt you for a file name. Now, fire up TT and print your return to "Apple Laserwriter II NT". You'll be prompted for a filename. Answer "C:\tax" or some such. Windows will print to file and probably add ".prn" to the file name you gave it. That's ok. Rename it to "tax.ps" (for postscript).

Now, if you have a postscript printer at home or work, you can stop there. Send that file directly to the printer and badda-boom-badda-bing, you're done.

If you don't have a postscript printer, the easiest thing to do is to convert the .ps file into an adobe .pdf file. The easiest way I've found to do this under windoze is with ghostscript/ghostview. Install these on your work or home computer. http://www.ghostscript.com/doc/AFPL/get704.htm and look under the "Windows" heading. Download gs704w32.exe and gsv43w32.exe. Now fire up ghostview from the start menu and open the tax.ps file. You should see the output on the screen. To convert to .pdf click File->Convert and select the "pdfwrite" device. Click "Ok" and you'll be prompted for a filename. Type in "tax.pdf". Now you're done. Bring in the tax.pdf file to print from work using acroread or save on your home computer and burn on CDROM in case of future audits. Have fun!

tucows == two cows, what a hoot!

The copyright assignment of GNU licensed s/w diminishes noone...

There is another way. Open Source.

By installing some GNU software (Ghostscript), a printer re-director (RedMon), and a few configurations, you'll be cranking out PDFs from your favorite program just by printing!

I performed this install on Windows XP, so your experience may vary.

1. Install AFPL Ghostscript. In my case, gs704w32.exe.

2. Install RedMon. In my case, redmon17.zip.

3. Go to your Add a New Printer wizard for Windows. a) Make it a local printer and don't automatically detect b) Choose create a new port and select Redirected Port from the dropdown menu. c) Unless you have good reason to do otherwise, just accept the default port name, which should be RPT1 d) Select a printer that has all the features you've always dreamed of your printer having! I chose Apple Color LaserWriter 12/1600 e) Fill out the next few dialog boxes as you see fit. Don't bother to print a test page. f) Now look at your printer's properties, select your new port, and choose to configure it.

4. Adjust your port. At this point, you should have a dialog box for port configuration displayed. Depending on where you installed Ghostscript, your values may vary below. Also, make sure you use the 16bit name for the path. Notice my "Program Files" has been represented as "PROGRA~1". Under Windows XP, you can get these names by using "dir /X" from a command line.

Field Label: Redirect this port to the program:

Value: C:PROGRA~1gsgs7.04bingswin32c.exe

Field Label: Arguments for this program are:

Value: @C:PROGRA~1gspdfwrite.rsp -sOutputFile="%1" -c save pop -f -

Dropdown Label: Output

Value: Prompt for filename

5. If you didn't notice, the Field Value for Arguments for this program contains a reference to a file pdfwrite.rsp. This is a plain text file and should contain something similar to the following. (Adjust at your own adventure and risk!)

-IC:PROGRA~1gsgs7.04lib;C:PROGRA~1gsfonts

-sDEVICE=pdfwrite

-r300

-dNOPAUSE

-dSAFER

-sPAPERSIZE=letter

Fire up your word processor or spreadsheet program and give it a try!

Perhaps it is a sledgehammer to crack a nut but I would rather use GhostScript. Both variants (AFPL and GPL) are esentially and totally free, respectively which I prefer. For such an article, is a commercial (and overpriced)viewer really appropriate?

Anyway, free basic PDF functionality can be had using Ghostscript and GSView. Granted, it is a two step process to create PDFs with this method, but it works and it is free.

On a related note, I've concentrated quite a bit over the past year in generating charts and graphs to multiple output formats simultaneously. Of interest here are some new versions of old standard apps, Gnuplot and Graphviz. Both applications contain SVG output capabilities in their latest builds. I've been using both to generate both PNG, but also PS and SVG. I will generally convert the PS to PDF via Ghostscript. To me this represents an incredible time savings by allowing me to generate PNG's to act as thumbnails for the SVG and PDF versions of the same graph. Consider also the ability to nest SVG objects within a larger SVG picture (or animation). To aid in technical illustration you could actually embed SVG chart animations with the other custom 2D animations that you seek to create to further clarify the idea you are trying to present.

Raster, vector and publication quality visualizations in one fell swoop without spending a dime. Schweet!

NM, here is this project that seems to be just that. Apparently Display Ghostscript is dead, but DPS lives on. Still don't see what the big whoop is.

• But the code is still patented? No! A post from Dan Miller, CEO of On2 Technologies on vorbis-dev:
  
  > Really!?! All I can say is wow. What about the patent issues? Are you
  > granting royalty-free license to the required patents along with the license
  > to the code?
  That's a requirement of the LGPL, so, yes
  
  
• But what about VP4? It's a better codec, and it's proprietary. VP3 is old news. This is in fact the business model taken by some of the leading self-sustaining free software projects like GhostScript, which releases a non-commercial-with-source version and a GPL'd version of GhostScript that's about a year old. Thus, the GPL'd version comes with Linux distributions, non-commercial entities can make use of the latest GhostScript, the company makes money selling licenses to perpetuate the development of the Free Software version, and everyone's happy.

Well, after some research, I settled on using LaTeX. Actually, I used the MiKTeX distribution on MS Win NT4.0. For the screenshots and Visio diagram manipulation, I wrote some Perl scripts and used ImageMagick and a copy of GhostScript 7.0 for producing PostScript and then PDF files for printing and distribution purposes. The comp.text.tex was a valuable resource as well.

I spent one weekend at home learning the basics of LaTeX, used the "Article" class to help produce a good document layout. Over the next 4 months I learned to write my own macros, create table of contents, indices, glossary, etc, and came up with a 500+ page technical design manual.

Not once did the system crash on me, and I could spend most of my time on the content. Yes, I did spend time on converting Windows .bmp bitmap files into JPG format for inclusion into the document, but with the help of some home-made Perl scripts, I pretty much automated the process of conversion, cropping and resizing. In the end, I preferred this method to dragging and resizing bitmaps within MSWord.

Customized Perl scripts were written to dynamically create LaTeX tables which showed software versions used in our product, references to other documents, etc. The entire document was dynamically "built" into a PDF file.

It took a little time to install, figure out and customize.

The end result was a very clean, compressed PDF document, which we could distribute to all interested parties via email.

I really learned a lot, and it saved me a lot of time formatting the document; I had content, and I had software that did the formatting for me.

Everyone was impressed, but LaTeX was not the "standard" within the company. "We must use MS Word", I was told. This came straight from upper management. Much of the document generation was automated, and there was obvious benefits (free open-source software, no crashing, PDF output without the use of Acrobat, dynamic image manipulation and data inclusion, etc). Even so, MS Word was to be used in subsequent documents.

The point is, even though you might think MS Word is crap and you want to look for alternatives, bear in mind the standards used within the company. Standards become even more important within "global" companies; too many non-standardized products can be costly.

Also, let's say you write a document in LaTeX or DOCBOOK, you quit or get hit by the bus one day (heaven forbid). How are your co-workers going to maintain your document? Can the secretary easily make formatting changes? How about your boss?

Over the past few months I began to use Word for much smaller documentation. It's a pain to use, but I did learn how to use it to make decent looking documents. It just takes more time to produce a document in Word than it does in LaTeX.

Hope this helps in giving you some ideas.

After many months of searching, I have yet to find a way to properly convert a PDF file (generated from LaTeX) to MS Word, retaining all formatting with the hyperlinks and references in MS Word format. Does anyone know?

Care to expand on how PDF isn't an open format? It's fully documented by Adobe in the book "PDF Reference" (ISBN: 0201615886 for the current 1.3 version, or 0201758393 for the soon to be released 1.4 version). It's also available online in various places, for example, http://wotsit.org. Furthermore, several independent implementations of PDF encoders and viewers exist, such as xpdf and ghostscript. Yes, many PDFs include LZW compressed data, but that's a problem with Unisys, not Adobe, and there are non-patent-infringing ways of uncompressing the data anyway. Plus, modern PDFs are compressed with the patent-free deflate algorithm. So exactly how more open do you want PDF to be?

More pointedly, I would direct you to an Interview with L. Peter Deutsch which addresses the precise issues surrounding copyright assignment that you seem to think so daunting.

Ghostscript has been not finding them to be a problem for a lot of years now.

I'll tell you why -- good old fashioned ego. Whereas the low end (kernel developers, compiler writers, etc.) and high end (clustering software, 3D modelling and rendering, etc.) of development is led by strong, well-organised teams of well-trained developers with vision and understanding, the middle ground of the Linux is polluted with warring egos that suffer too much from the problematic NIH (Not Invented Here) syndrome. There are a myriad of competing, mutually incompatible yet separately inadequate office suites (Star Office, KOffice, Applix,...), desktop environments (KDE, Gnome, XFCE, CDE, UDE, ROX,...), and X servers (XFree86, MetroX, XiG). We can't even decide on a printing system! I realize that, according to Eric S. Raymond's famous "Cathedral and Bazaar" text, that open-source software is primarily written to scratch an itch and get peer recognition, but this is taking it too far. If all the man-hours poured into KDE and GNOME were combined into a common vision, we would have one perfect end-user desktop, instead of two poor imitations of Windows.

Don't give me the old "competition" argument either. There is only one Linux kernel, which seems to progress just fine without another competing project nipping at its feet and instigating flamewars. The endless KDE vs. GNOME, Applix vs. StarOffice, and other feuds have wasted more productivity than would be gained by and competitive drive.

I, for one, am somewhat miffed that while my operating system powers Hollywood blockbusters and NASA supercomputers, it still can't fully replace Windows on my office desktop. Linux is growing up; its users need to grow up with it, shed their egos and work towards the common goal of creating an excellent working environment.

Prepare files in which the file content conforms to the Portable Document Format.

Write drivers and applications that produce output represented in the Portable Document Format.

Write software that accepts input in the form of the Portable Document Format and displays the results, prints the results, or otherwise interprets a file represented in the Portable Document Format.

Copy Adobe's copyrighted list of operators and data structures, as well as the PDF sample code and PostScript language Function definitions in the written specification, to the extent necessary to use the Portable Document Format for the above purposes.

The only condition on such copyright permission is that anyone who uses the copyrighted list of operators and data structures in this way must include an appropriate copyright notice.

Hmmm..... Sounds kind of familiar. We own the copyright but you may use it. Just comply with our specifications and give us credit for coming up with the format.

Try going to GhostScript.Com to get a Linux compatible PDF reader/writer.

Ahhhh... I yearn for the good old days when being able to use a computer actually meant you had to know something.

This is where I part ways with the FSF. I agree that it makes sense to have source code. I think that one should have access to the source code for any app on one's computer. I think that one should be able to distribute of the software, or even sell them. I even believe that software copyrights should be shorter than normal ones--perh. 3 years. Look at GhostScript. Those guys make money, and they support Free Software (not just Open Source).

Programmers need to make money. They are highly trained, and their labour is valuable. The methods that the FSF suggests do not seem to cut it for me. We don't need a computer tax to pay the enlightened to program--it would fall prey to all the pitfalls of any other brain-dead socialist programme. Saying `just write for industry' sidesteps the question. I really like the idea of short-term copyright; allow the producers to make money, but then allow for freedom.

The FSF is big on freedom, but short on realism.

I just hope that these Gobe fellows do well; I really do. They look like a nice bunch, and their product looks great. I'd hate to see it and their dreams die.

ps2pdf ships with most Linux distributions as part of Ghostscript I believe. Just print to a file and then convert it.

On the windows end, you might want to check out FreePDF. It gives you instructions on how to mix the previously mentioned ghostscript, as well as a few other tools, to give you the ability to print to pdf format from any windows application.

As several people have already pointed out, there are official drivers right now that work very well with Ghostscript. While these drivers are not quite open source, they come fairly close. No binary-only drivers like the Lexmark Z52, these come with full source and rights to do your own modifications. The one restriction keeping them from being fully dfsg compliant is the requirement that they be used only with HP printers. The nice engineers at HP are very aware of the advantages of moving to a true free software model, and are busy shepherding this through the corporate bureaucracy.

All in all, I'm pleased and impressed with HP's support of Linux and free software. Given the context they're operating in, I'm not surprised that it's taking time to do things right, and I'm willing to grant them that.

They already have. Here's a link to the project. You'll need Ghostscript 5.5. They've released it under a modified BSD license.