Baslinux mailing list

[Lee Forrest <lforrestster AT gmail.com>]

On Mon, Jan 22, 2007 at 06:40:33AM +0000, sindi keesan wrote:
> On Sun, 21 Jan 2007, Lee Forrest wrote:
> 
> htmldoc is available as open source 3.2MB tar.bz2 download.  It can
 
[delete]

> The dependencies for Slackware 4.0 ghostscript are the two svgalib 
> libraries:
> 
> libvga.so.1

370K  

Big library.

> libvgagl.so.1

58K

I don't have those anywhere on BL.

> (which I just packaged together with the newzgv from BL1 and uploaded to 
> http://keesan.freeshell.org/bl/zgv-bl3.tgz)

That's good.

> 
> libc.so.5

570K

> libm.so.5

32K

Got those. Seem to be standard.

> Slackware 4.0 gs was compiled not to require X, and uses svgalib to 
> display files instead.  gs itself is 1.3MB, there are another 863k of 
> files in one directory and documentation.  And you probably need more than 
> the basic font selection that I packaged for use with the xpdf CLI 
> programs because I don't have it displaying anything with fonts yet, tho I 
> made a symlink to /usr/share/ghostscript/5.10/fonts from 
> /usr/local/share... (where xpdf programs were looking for the fonts).
> It displayed a scanned image file and zeroline.ps.

Could be that xpdf wants fonts that encoded differently than gs.

> ps2pdf may be working but I cannot view the output with gs (or any other 
> pdf file) yet.
> 
> gs seems far smaller or at least simpler than HTMLDOC-cum-dependencies and 
> should be adequate to print the output of Abiword, either as user with 
> printcap and lpr, or as root after producing a ps file with Abiword and 
> then using the gs-based pstopdf|pdftoppm|pbmtolj > /dev/lp0 (pdftoppm - 
> xpdf, pbmtolj - netbbm)

Looks like they may be about the same size, but htmldoc is _way_ simple
to use:

htmldoc -f foo.pdf foo.html --webpage 

That's it. And you have pdf doc from a webpage. The pdf doc could
be many pages long, if the webpage was long. It has lots of other
options, but they are easy to understand. You can make a whole book
from webpages, ready for the printer and bindery, in a jiff.

> Opera will save as HTML or plain text, but not as ps.  To print webpages 
> as 'root' with formatting and images, you would need Phoenix (or later 
> incarnations) and use Ron's method to save as ps and then use gs's pstopdf 
> etc.  Firefox is rather slow on 200MHz computers even with 64MB RAM.
> Maybe there is some smaller program to convert html to ps?

A bash script that would convert _simple_ webpages into ps wouldn't be that
hard, I _think_. PS is all text (pretty sure), so images must be converted
to ascii. 

It's just another markup language like html/tex/groff...One that
printers understand. (I hope I'm right about that last.)

I just made a PS3 doc from a simple webpage (htmldoc) with a few
short paragraphs and one image. Total html file length 1K. Image
62K jpeg.

The vast majority of the 807K PS3 doc is the image converted into
ascii, like mimencode or uuencode, but vastly less efficient.
The same image mimencoded is 83K.

I don't know what kind of ascii-encoded-image that is, but a
utility that converted images into that format would be needed
for the script. If nothing else, it could be pulled out of the
htmldoc code, but that shouldn't be necessary.

(The same webpage converted to PDF is 457K. But it's binary.)

I'm talking about a script that deals with webpages that could be
printed just as they are displayed on the screen, one page of ps
per screenful of processed html. What you see is what you get. It
will _all_ print. And could easily be written manually. HTML1 or
2.

You could make tasteful books/magazines/newspapers with it.

Writing such a script for _all_ webpages would be a formidable
task, and that's the least of the reasons I have no interest in
such a project.

(A script to convert modern-dreadful HTML to basic HTML would be
great. A filter to run every webpage throught _before_ it got
to your browser.

Here are a couple of interesting PS links:

http://www.linuxjournal.com/article/2386

http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/search/index.cfm?loc=en_us&term=postscript+language

Docs are not a problem, but you need a PDF viewer to display them! :-)

Writing basic PS by hand would not be practical. But writing
basic HTML by hand, _is_. It would be possible to write an
interactive script that called basic PS formatting functions,
but we all know and use basic HTML anyway.

-------

Any such script is now at the bottom of a list of projects I need
to tackle in order. First up is getting an Xserver that will get
good images out of my i810 chip.

Am working on building 3.3.6 on my uclibc OS. Has an i810 server
with all the functionality _I_ need.

Instead of trading libc5 for libc6, I plan on trading libc5 for
uclibc (Which is half the size of libc5 but does everything I
need (keep your fingers crossed) that libc6 offers. I built ppp
(pppd,chat...) and setserial on it today, and it already has most
of what the stock BL3 has, including busybox.

When I get everything I have on BL3 on uclibc, I'll move the libs
and executables over to BL3. They both use the same kernel.

Hopefully it will be less than 20M without a compiled-apps
development environment.

[delete]

Lee

-- 
BasicLinux: Small is Beautiful
http://www.basiclinux.com.ru