Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

Someone sent me 2 pages that they scanned and converted to pdf.
Xpdf displayed them as blank.
pdf2ps produced a 0 length file.
pdftops (DOS) told me that this is pdf 1.5 and I need 1.4.

gs 5.10 gave me a page of error messages (DOS or linux, Alladin)

I downloaded the SW81 gs 7.05 and installed it and discovered that it does 
not support vgalib display, just X.  (To determine the display devices 
available type gs or gs --help).  I uninstalled it as I prefer not to 
waste time loading X every time I want to view a pdf file.

Delilinux has gs 7.05 so I downloaded that.  It is about 5M (downloaded at
1.3 to 3.1 k/sec) because it includes the fonts.  I did explodepkg and
then tried typing ./gs and was told it needs libgimpprint.so.1

MANIFEST.z lists a /libgimp/ directory but not libgimpprint.
gimp is in the gtk directory.
Would i need to install gtk and gimp in order to run this gs?
I have not used either of these.

Can I find just that one library for SW71?  Is there any chance that the 
author of delilinux accidentally compiled with options such that it will 
not work with SW71 files?  (Unlikely, his other programs have been 
perfect - Xvesa, zgv, w3m, links2 recent version.)

The delilinux gs requires a lot of libraries not needed by the SW71 
version (libping libjpeg and various X libraries).  It does not require 
libvga and libvgagl, which the SW71 version does require, so probably will 
not work with libvga anyway.  Or am I wrong?

There was also a gs 7.05 at linuxnet or linux.net but I cannot find it
again.  Can someone please remind me of the URL.  I recall being unable to
figure out how to download anything there so did not bookmark it.

The delilinux gs came with ps2pdf14, which converts ps to pdf 1.4, but I 
did not see anything that will convert pdf 1.5 to pdf 1.4 - does anyone 
know of such a program?  Perhaps the pdf2ps that comes with 7.05 will work 
on pdf 1.5.  It is twice the size of the old one.  But it needs gs to run 
and gives me the same error message about libbimpprint.

I will see if the SW81 gs 7.05 has a pdf2ps that works on pdf 1.5 (but I 
need to download it again first).  

The people who sent me the pdf 1.5 eventually managed to produced a pdf
1.4.  They are clever, and also know how to produce gifs (I trained them
to send mono gifs instead of 16 million color jpegs of a BW page) with
their scanner, but most of the people who scan pages and send them as pdf
have no idea how their 'pdf machine' software works (one of them produced
pdf at fax resolution, which looked terrible), so I need some way to deal
with this.  I hope not to have to compile my own gs (or use gs with X,
because I am all set up to view with bmv in svgalib, and don't want to
chase down ghostview and learn that).


Sindi