Baslinux mailing list

[Sindi Keesan <keesan AT iamjlamb.com>]

On Mon, 12 Jul 2004 3aoo-cvfd AT dea.spamcon.org wrote:

> Sindi Keesan wrote:
> >
> > xpdf from SW71 won't do pdf 1.5 either.
> 
> I use the xpdf package from Slackware 8.1.
> 
> Cheers,
> Steven

I was going to look at the SW8.1 package except first I wrote Doug Kaufman 
(who compiled the console parts of xpdf for us last year) and he informed 
me that:

1.  xpdf 3.0 is the first version to handle pdf 1.5 (the latest Adobe 6.0)
and came out Jan 22, 2004, so probably is not what you find in SW8.1.

2.  xpdf is available precompiled for linux already -4.55MB download from 
www.foolabs.com/pub/xpdf.  It requires glibc 2.2 (SW8.1 provides glibc 
2.2.5 - just upgrade by installpkg the glibc 2.2.5 so file that is also 
needed to run precompiled Opera 7).  It is statically linked to motif, 
t1lib and Freetype 2 (which are provided in source frm in case you want to 
compile your own version instead).  But as Doug said, why bother?  (Unless 
of course you want to use xpdf in BL3, or in BL2 without upgrading glibc).

The console parts of xpdf (pdftops, pdftotext, pdfimages, pdfinfo) are 
available precompiled for Win32  and for DOS (!) - 1.8MB.

There are fonts in various languages that you can add if you want to read 
documents in other languages.  And I think it said that to get the basic 
Roman fonts you need to have installed gs (or the fonts for it) first.

3. AFPL (Aladdin) Ghostscript 8.14 does NOT do pdf 1.5, but version 8.30 
beta (which will be released in a few weeks) does pdf 1.5.  Version 8.14 
is the first to do encrypted pdf.  

It should be possible to use the pdftops from xpdf to convert any pdf 1.5,
and then view or print it with gs 5.10 from SW7.1, optionally with bmv for
better resolution in svgalib mode, assuming someone did not come up with a
newer ps that also wont' work with older programs.

The SW81 ghostscript displays in X11 but not in vgalib.  SW71 displays in
either, with X11 as the default (you can change the default, or specify
the device command line with -sDEVICE=vgalib).  Hal sent me a list of
devices supported by the gs 7.05 (?) compiled for SW91 and it does not
appear to support ANY screen devices, just scads of printers and image
formats, meaning if you want to view the pdf file, you need xpdf not gs, 
or else possibly gs with a viewer such as GSview.

I have tried converting to an image and viewing but quality is lost.

Debian's gs 7 (or maybe it was 6.5) supports svgalib.  From looking at the 
source code for gs 8.14, I cannot find any mention of a screen output (X11 
or otherwise) as the device, but it can be used in X with GSview (in linux 
or even in Win32).

I will wait and attempt to compile gs 8.30 for BL2 with library upgraded 
to 2.2.5 (from SW81) and post that later.  

In the meantime I am working on convincing people to send me something 
other than pdf 1.5 when they scan.  One company managed to reconvert to 
what was supposed to be a more compressed format in Adobe 4.0 (pdf 1.4?) 
which came out larger, but they are more clever than most.  Another 
company sent me a tif after promising a gif, then wanted to send a jpeg, 
then promised a WORD file (Antiword should be able to retrieve the 
embedded pngs in a WORD file, says its author) but sent RTF.  Our fax 
machine was not behaving so she finally FedExed.

Is there some way, using linux, to get faxes emailed to one that can be 
printed out at fax resolution somehow?  Someone else scanned at fax 
resolution (200x200 or worse) which I printed at 300x300 and it looked 
awful.