Baslinux mailing list

[sindi keesan <keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org>]

On Wed, 9 Feb 2005, James Miller wrote:

> On Wed, 9 Feb 2005, sindi keesan wrote:
>
> > I was just informed by the person who helped me compile gs that this is a
> > form designed to be filled in (electronically?) which gs cannot yet handle
> > correctly.  If I had longer paper I could print it on that.
>
> Take a piece a scrap paper and some scotch tape and tape the scrap piece
> to the back of a good piece such that about 2/3 of the scrap hangs out
> over the good one.  Feed that into your printer, scrap end first. It may
> take a bit of trial and error to get the exact placement of the scrap
> paper right, but I would think the second attempt should work if the first
> doesn't.

Good idea, but I just remembered we have a pile of wide fanfold paper that 
I was saving for this sort of application (and now we even have a wide 
Okidata 9-pin printer, given to us to recycle).

I am trying to run a business and taped paper would not really impress 
people with my cleverness.  It also might get stuck in the fax machine - I 
am supposed to sign and fax someone the form.  I finally signed the 3/4 
page, which luckily ended just above the instructions.

> > keesan.freeshell.org/gs850.pdf

Of course I meant gs850.tgz, sorry.

> > James, could you post this please, with a note that it requires BL2 with
> > glibc2.2.5 (might work in BL3 with upgraded glibc), includes epson and
> > okidata printers but not bmp or fax formats as devices, has been tested as
> > working with epson and deskjet drivers, and on files that are all image or
> > all text, and requires x11 to display because lvga256lib and vgalib would
> > not compile.

This new gs can deal with JBIG2 and Adobe pdf1.5, which earlier versions 
could not, but not with files formatted to be filled in (like tax forms), 
for which use xpdf, or convert to ps with pdftops from xpdf then view the 
ps file with gs.

XFree86 is recommended rather than XVESA if you want to enlarge the 
onscreen copy - zoom with Ctrl-Alt-(grey+).

> > mkdir /usr/local/share/ghostscript/fonts and copy over the old ghostscript
> > fonts from /usr/share/ghostscript/fonts (or unpackage the SW71 gs fonts
> > package and copy them manually to that location).
>
> Is this really a pdf file? I'll try and get to it soon. Lots to do at the
> moment, so forgive any delay.

Since nobody else has expressed any interest in the new gs, no hurry, and 
I will leave it at my site for a while.  The file is nearly 5MB.

I might try compiling gv or ghostview but they seem to require various 
other things that we don't have in BL2.  widgets.  The widgets might also 
need to be compiled.  For gs I also had to compile zlib, libpng, jpeg, 
jbig2dec, and jasper (or at least configure for them).

What is a widget?

Unrelated, but the zip drive mini-HOWTO said for scsi zip drives you need 
only the scsi modules, then the card module (possibly with io and irq), 
and you can partition and format the disk with fdisk and mke2fs.  iw may 
be needed if the disk comes preformatted for DOS and is locked and you 
want to reformat it.

We were offered a second working scsi card with a different cable.

In kernel 2.0, you could not set up to both print and use a parport zip 
drive on the same port, had to rmmod lp to use ppa, which is apparently 
only for parport zip drives.  You still need the three scsi modules but 
not a scsi card module, use ppa (or for later models) imm instead.  With 
luck you should be able to plug the printer into the zip drive if you have 
only one parport.

 > > James
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keesan AT sdf.lonestar.org
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org