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[Files] AFPL Ghostscript 8.13 ported to i686-AROSANN.lu
Posted on 01-Jun-2004 01:40 GMT by whoosh8 comments
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I have recompiled my 68k AFPL Ghostscript 8.13 port to i686-AROS. Outside of the viewers everything appears to be functioning, and within the viewers just the truecolour WB viewer for PS and PDF is functioning. revisit http://www.whoosh777.pwp.blueyonder.co.uk This port was done using my recent port to 68k host of the x86-AROS gcc-3.3.1, so the one port was used to port the other port.

Of the 6 viewer options just the most useful one functions!

With the truecolour WB viewer the colours and image are completely correct, and the viewer is very responsive.

Possibly the other viewers dont function because of endianess, so I will look into this possibility,

The 5 non functioning viewers just produce either an empty window or a window with correct image but wrong colours.

As Turboprint hasnt been ported to x86-AROS, the Turboprint devices cannot currently be used but are compiled in,

The port is a very clean port, the few hitches which occured were quite painless. There were no missing API calls at the linker stage,

I will next be attempting ports of AFPL Ghostscript 8.13 to other AmigaOS variants,

:these other ports will be attempted first before trying to fix the 5 non functioning viewers of this port.

The port takes 3.5 hours to build on WinUAE and the resulting binary is 3.2mb,

List of all comments to this article
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Comment 1Joe "Floid" Kanowitz01-Jun-2004 02:56 GMT
Comment 2Anonymous01-Jun-2004 08:17 GMT
Comment 3whoosh01-Jun-2004 22:46 GMT
Comment 4whoosh01-Jun-2004 23:04 GMT
Comment 5justnotbill02-Jun-2004 06:51 GMT
AFPL Ghostscript 8.13 ported to i686-AROS : Comment 6 of 8ANN.lu
Posted by Joe "Floid" Kanowitz on 02-Jun-2004 13:27 GMT
In reply to Comment 3 (whoosh):
you can also put vertical barriers, the problem I ran into is that
the GS internal API doesnt seem to provide a way to revisit the same page at a
different resolution with different vertical and horizontal boundary,

so I could only see how to visit each page once, each page can have a
totally different resolution and positioning etc, but you cannot
re-render that page in a different way: you can only move on to the
next page,

Ah, I didn't think about that, and that'd be a joykill. This basically amounts to having to "reflow" the document like having to "reflow" an HTML page (except, of course, Postscript is more programmatic)... So as a wild guess, GSView probably does force it to "run" the whole .PS each time if it offers properly recomputed zooming, but tells it all pages save the one of interest have no lines worth rendering, maybe? Or maybe it just uses a heck of a lot of RAM, as I seem to remember it doing. ;)

(What I was thinking of was the UNIX distribution's X11 output device, which of course behaves similar, but doesn't support any interaction beyond the one scaling picked, and 'hit enter to view the next page.' I'll admit, I haven't even used that version much, because my printers are always broken! Guess your Amiga viewer has long since beaten it...?)

As to the licensing and all, yeah, I don't want to revisit any headaches, as noted... but do remember all the BSD stuff in the world is explicity there for your pleasure, with an 'advertising clause' at the worst. (For all the GPL fans, I'm not even trying to be an evangelist, I'm just saying... ;))

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Er, and just for the sake of pointing out related software in case anyone doesn't know it exists, the HP IJS drivers might be of interest to anyone with more free time to spend hacking than cash for commercial drivers.

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@justnotbill: Of course, but "Every program attempts to expand until it can read mail. Those programs which cannot so expand are replaced by ones which can." ;)
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Comment 7whoosh02-Jun-2004 16:48 GMT
Comment 8whoosh03-Jun-2004 20:17 GMT
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