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On Fri, 28 Mar 2008, Sindi wrote:

> You did not mention you were trying to view non-Latin characters.

Hunh? I mentioned Greek, Hebrew, and Syriac in a recent post. Since when 
do those languages' alphabets qualify as Latin?

> You need to install the ghostscript fonts for whatever language/script you 
> are trying to view.  Abiword for BL comes with only Latin fonts.

Abiword at least has Symbol, which gives me a semblance of Greek. I really 
should have polytonic Greek, though (with diacritical markings and dead 
keys for their placement). But that's a project for another day. Most 
pdf's I will want to view will be almost all in English, and most 
documents I will create will have little or no Greek or Hebrew in them. I 
can always just transliterate, too.

> It is not terribly complicated to add svgalib and svp as gs frontends. 
> They work with kernel 2.2 (just edit libvga.config from Helper to 
> Nohelper).  My package for svgalib comes with lots of stuff you don't even 
> need (header files for static compilation which I probably did not need to 
> include).  I think you do need libpng12.so.0.16.0 for links2 but probably 
> not to use svp.  You don't need the svgalib_helper module for kernel 2.2.
>
> You might need the newer libvga.config but you could try just fetching
> libvga.so.1.9.25-neo, put in /usr/lib, ldconfig (change the name by 
> removing -neo or symlink it to libvga.so.1.9.25).  Then svp ought to work 
> with any gs.
>
> svp-glib225 is my executable.  I don't seem to have packaged it with any 
> documentation.  --help.  26K.
> libvga.so.1.9.25-neo is 165K

This does not provide a solution to the problem of viewing non-Latin fonts 
though, does it? It would be an alternative to the xpdf set-up I currently 
have, with the same non-Latin limitations I've described, right?

> GS  fonts.htm
> All about fonts... and how to add new ones.
> Most gs fonts are .pfb which is PostScript Type 1.  Fontmap file, 
> aliases...
>
> See the Hebrew HOWTO.
>
> You may have to add your own Hebrew fonts for gs by converting them from 
> some other format, or editing Fontmap.....  Good luck.

Thanks. I did run across some information on that already. It's a project 
I may tackle later, but I'm trying to finish with this initial phase of 
getting all basic functionality set up on the laptop. Getting the 
capability to view or create documents with those non-Latin characters in 
them falls in the category of system tweaking in preparation for any 
conceivable scenario short of all-out nuclear war.

James