deutsch@parcplace.com (Peter Deutsch) (01/12/91)
Ghostscript, a piece of GNU software available from the Free Software Foundation, is a no-charge P*stScr*pt previewer that runs on a very wide variety of Unix systems, including Sun-3 and Sun-4 under either SunView or X Windows. It is also known to run on DECstations, on VAXen under both Ultrix and VMS, and under MS-DOS on any IBM PC or compatible with EGA or VGA display. (It will probably run on just about any Unix + X system, since it is carefully written to be very portable -- the same source code compiles on all of the above machines, with essentially no #ifs or #ifdefs in any .c file.) It handles monochrome, gray scale, and color, and can work equally well with its own rather mediocre fonts, with Adobe (Type 1) fonts, and with user-written (Type 3) fonts. I believe the performance of the most recent release is better than either ralpage or xps, but I haven't tested them myself. The source files of the current release, including a small amount of documentation, are available on prep.ai.mit.edu:/pub/gnu/ghostscript-2.1*; they will compile with either cc or gcc. If you have further questions, please send e-mail to ghost@aladdin.com.
Mark.Bush@prg.oxford.ac.uk (Mark Bush) (01/16/91)
In article <1204@brchh104.bnr.ca> deutsch@parcplace.com (Peter Deutsch) writes: > Ghostscript, a piece of GNU software available from the Free Software > Foundation, is a no-charge P*stScr*pt previewer that runs on a very wide > variety of Unix systems, including Sun-3 and Sun-4 under either SunView or > X Windows. > > I believe the performance of > the most recent release is better than either ralpage or xps, but I > haven't tested them myself. I have just recently installed GhostScript on our system. Quick tests show that this version (2.1) is at least one order of magnitude faster than ralpage and compares well against the "pageview" previewer that comes with OpenWindows (previewing worldmap.ps from the OW area was about 2-3 times slower with pageview...). I was very impressed with its handling of colour PS. The SunView version doesn't seem to handle colour, but I'm an X person so that doesn't bother me 8*) Mark