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[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

I found a Deb gs aladdin 7.07 (debian.paradise.net.nz) for 'pool'.  What 
is pool?  A hour later I determined it needs glibc 2.3.1.  Debian archives 
remain sealed.  Debian gs works with svgalib or X but where on earth can 
one get something for Debian 2.2 potato (glibc 2.1.3) or even for what 
they claim is current stable woody (kernel 2.2.2, glibc ?).  Hal sent me 
Deb 2.1 but I doubt it will have a later gs than SW71 since it is older.
(On top of which I can't even look at it because my CD-ROM drive refuse to 
umount even tho it is not busy.)  

It might be time to install SW81 gs 7.05 and rename the old one so I can 
use both.  THe SW81 version no longer supports vgalib so cannot display 
without X, but I think I can get around that by converting to ps and using 
bmv (assuming the SW81 pdf2ps works on pdf 1.5 files).


On Tue, 29 Jun 2004, Sindi Keesan wrote:

> 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
> 
>