25-Apr-2024 06:35 GMT.		 UNDER CONSTRUCTION
[Files] A.F.P.L Ghostscript 8 released today!ANN.lu
Posted on 18-Jul-2003 13:25 GMT by whoosh777 (Edited on 2003-07-19 16:45:59 GMT by Teemu I. Yliselä)15 comments
View flat
View list
A.F.P.L Ghostscript 8.00 for 68020 compatible Amigas released today. For printing + viewing and converting PS and PDF docs, eg 24 bit rgb printing via Turboprint, 24 bit rgb Cybergraphics viewers and HAM8 viewer for AGA machines. click for full info, this program doesnt cost anything! A.F.P.L Ghostscript 8.00 released today!

This contains a major fixing of the Turboprint devices to make them compliant with Ghostscript 8. Now you can print PS and PDF in commercial quality 24 bit rgb via the Turboprint devices.

Brand new PS + PDF viewing options have been written from scratch to enable viewing in truecolour via graphics cards (Cybergraphics and hopefully Picasso too). To know if you can use these viewers type "version cybergraphics.library full" from a shell, if you get a meaningful reply then the truecolour viewers are available. The Cybergraphics viewers have only been tested in depth (with success) on 2 graphics cards and superficially on 2 other cards so problems could occur, if so email me: whoosh777@blueyonder.co.uk and I will try to fix any problems.

Also written are 6 brand new AGA viewers for PS and PDF, including a HAM8 custom screen viewer for 262144 colour viewing, also present is a colour WB viewer window.

I am interested also in feedback positive or negative of whether the viewers function on Pegasos and A1. <tr>This is an optimised FPU noixemul 68020 compile, I will do a no-FPU version over the next few days. <tr>The manual can be viewed online or downloaded via http://www.whoosh777.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk/atlast.html

List of all comments to this article
Sorted by date, most recent at bottom
Comment 1whoosh18-Jul-2003 11:38 GMT
Comment 2Anonymous18-Jul-2003 11:41 GMT
Comment 3Iggy Drougge18-Jul-2003 15:12 GMT
Comment 4whoosh18-Jul-2003 17:06 GMT
Comment 5AnonX20-Jul-2003 19:00 GMT
A.F.P.L Ghostscript 8 released today! : Comment 6 of 15ANN.lu
Posted by Anonymous on 20-Jul-2003 19:58 GMT
In reply to Comment 5 (AnonX):
AnonX said:>very cool, but why 12 viewers?good question!its complicated:Ghostscript, PS and PDF are primarily about printers,so the viewers operate by masquerading as being printers.Now the way I have done the viewers you can view ginormous bitmaps,eg Steve Hargreaves told me using the viewers on a huge expanded bitmap he had some 700kb left, and his machine has either 64meg or 128 meg,so he possibly had a 50meg bitmap or something!anyway, the problem with printer bitmaps is you are dealing with very large numbers. eg a 1200dpi a4 24 bit rgb image is some 400 meg,Now there are consequences of this, firstly the more colours you wish the greater the ram usage and the slower the viewer graphics.So it means you always have a tradeoff between image quality and memory usage + speed. eg you can multiply viewer graphics speed by a factor of 4 by halving the resolution, here you have traded in detail for speed.Now as a way out of this dilemma Ghostscript provides several totally unrelated render methods, after careful study I have selected 3 which I regard as the most useful, each involves a different tradeoff:1. 24 bit rgb render, maximum colours, truecolour, but slow and memory hungry,2. 8 bit gray: photorealism but in gray, advantage= 3 * as fast graphics as 1., and 3 * as little memory so for the a4 example above 400 meg becomes 100 meg, this is more likely to fit in a 68060 machine!3. 1 bit b/w. This looks doubtful, just a *2* colour palette, but the reason for it is its for things like my laser printer, which only understands black and white, no grays and no colours. For text only it is perfect, for some wonderful colour picture its not so good. Now the great thing about 1 bit b/w is the Ghostscript PS render is exceedingly fast. Where you have to wait for the 24 bit render, 1 bit is like instant. So from a viewer POV, if you have downloaded a 579 page PDF file eg the G3 manual, you really want speed.OK this gives you 3 viewers with different tradeoffs, 1 bit which is very fast vs 24 bit which looks really nice,however there is a further issue: resolution, super-hi-res-laced uses 8 * as much memory as lo-res, thus lo-res will be 8 * as fast but with 8 * as little detail.To give you different resolutions you need custom screens, so we get the above 3 viewers again but for custom screens.This gives us 6 viewers.Now a further problem, AGA vs graphics cards.Graphics code for graphics cards will not run on AGA,AGA graphics will not run on graphics cards.So this means 6 viewers for Cybergraphics and 6 for AGA.6 + 6 = 12!So really 12 == 2 * 2 * 3,2 for the set size of { AGA , Cyber }2 for the set size of { custom_screen, WB_viewer }3 for set size of {24 bit rgb, 8 bit gray, 1 bit b/w }giving 2 * 2 * 3 == 24.Its slightly more complicated though,printing is a highly "polymorphic" affair,each output method comes with its own quirks, so each of the above 12 needs its own separate treatment.(Likewise every single printer comes with its own quirks,each and every printer is eccentric, compare a laser with an inkjet with a dot matrix. inkjets give you eg truecolour,compare this with my ancient Star-LC 10 dot matrix with 7 colours!The advantage of Turboprint is that the product has really tuned into each and every printer that it supports, ie its quite perfectionist)For the viewers the core code is the same, but there are multiple execution paths to deal with the differences, eg a depth-8 cyber screen behaves a bit like AGA eg it has a colour palette, so depth-8 gray Cyber screen requires its own execution path different from eg depth 15,16,or 24 gray Cyber screen.: depth 8 cyber requires graphics.library vs eg depth 16 cyber requires cybergraphics.library.Now AGA cannot do 24 bit colour, so here we can use:HAM8 for pseudo 18 bit (64 * 64 * 64) colour HAM8 needs its own private code because it is so wierd,many specific tricks are needed to eliminate lurid HAM8 artefacts which could happen on scrolling a HAM8 image.now HAM8 is great for pictures, but if you have delicate colour lines HAM8 has some colour inertia,so a second method is provided for AGA: 216 colour which gives you sharp colour changes, useful for egblue text on white background (which I have endured!),216 colour viewer is good for docs with simple colour usage,cheap and cheerful colour.Now for AGA WB, 8 bit gray is not an option, so instead there are 2 WB window viewers: 1 bit b/w == very fast and a colour viewer. AGA WB gives you convenience but lacks the subtlety of colour of custom screen HAM8.Thus for AGA there are 4 Custom screen viewers and 2 WB viewers.Now with AGA the custom screen 1 bit b/w viewer only uses *1* bitplane, this makes extremely fast viewer graphics:compare, 1 bit b/w 1 bitplane lores == 8 * 2 * 2 * 2 == 64 times as fast as HAM8 super hi res laced == 3 * 64 == 192 times as fast as 24 bit rgb super hi res laced,(all other things being equal)would you say no to a 192 graphics speedup?Anyway with page renders all the numbers multiply up till you hit the boundary of your machine eg the 400 meg a4 page above.The above is why there are 12 viewers.If I just gave you 1 method for Cyber namely the most convenient + maximum quality one which is truecolour WB viewer,there would be a time + memory penalty for this,why use truecolour if its just the text you want to read:1 bit b/w will get you through the doc much faster.:same thing for printing, if you print via Turboprint 1 bit b/w printing is much faster than truecolour.:if you have 500 pages to print you may wish to speed up the whole process, and only reprint in truecolour really interesting pages.Sorry about the length of reply but things quickly get very complicated with the printing processwhoosh777PS: as this thread has been selected for the moderated forum ignore what I said in the earlier posting! :I think the rearranging of the thread start has been very thoughtfully done by the moderators,(there was a malfunction when I made the original announce,something I did annoyed the framework!)
Jump...
#12 whoosh777
TopPrevious commentNext commentbottom
List of all comments to this article (continued)
Comment 7Kulwant Bhogal21-Jul-2003 07:15 GMT
Comment 8Steve Hargreaves21-Jul-2003 12:47 GMT
Comment 9AnonX21-Jul-2003 12:52 GMT
Comment 11whoosh77721-Jul-2003 14:13 GMT
Comment 12whoosh77721-Jul-2003 19:07 GMT
Comment 13Kulwant Bhogal22-Jul-2003 12:08 GMT
Comment 14whoosh77722-Jul-2003 19:20 GMT
Comment 15Kulwant Bhogal22-Jul-2003 19:42 GMT
Comment 16whoosh77723-Jul-2003 15:04 GMT
Back to Top