OT: Ghostscript, won't install

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Amazon appears cheaper on X3... by quite a lot. ...Jim Thompson

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And about 4900 years to investigate the things he ought to know.

-- Bill Sloman, Nijmegen

He wore that one out, long ago!

Why bother? Here are over 1200 fonts:

Jeorge just doesn't want to take the time to lern how to use it.

Hi Jörg,

;-) Postscript may use vectors but much more. To compare Postscript with HPGL is just to compare LaTeX (or ma be Word2007 ;-) vs. edlin.

Try to use different line-width. With HPGL it's really a crap. HPGL was designed to use pen-plotters. That was a really good alternative when color-printers where not available. Bit since most ink-printers have photo capabilities and are "cheap" available just until A0-size pen plotters are almost dead ans so HPGL too.

Shure word 5.0 does, I used it very often. But only if you used a postscript-output device like ghostscript or a PS-printer.

This is very easy to understand. PS is not only a printerformat like PCL or HPGL. With postscript you can really program complex things that you can't just import to a simple sheet of paper. This is teh rason, why most programs imports PDF. But having Ghostscript the way is very easy, just converting the PS-Files to PDF and import them ;-) This was so easy done, that I forgot its need when I told you about inkscape and scribus. Bu I remember, your windoof didn't want to install ghostscript but you managed it now. So you don't have the problem now and therefore you are now able to do your job. Convert your PS-files to PDF and import them to inkscape or just use pdsXchange. Even with the free Viewer, you can insert comments, markups, texts...

Marte

Jim, Cadence offers a slew of old versions of PSpice Schematic (with rapidly escalating bloat). Anything that recommends one over the other?

Yes, but after years of crashing Acrobat software I don't want it :-)

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But not sold via Amazon, comes from some other vendors. Purplus isn't always the best deal for new versions but they often carry older ones and those can be the real bargain. Got a mech CAD there for ten bucks, similar reason, to be able to read in and mark up AutoCad files. When I installed it I found out it even has 3D capability. Woohoo!

Well, that may be so but for me only the results count. Right now nothing over here (other than GhostScript) will read in PS and Ghostcscript messes up some fonts. Plus the rendering is a wee bit fuzzy. HPGL in the 90's did just one thing: It worked. Always. Crisp and clear schematics on the screen and in print, never any font issues (it doesn't use any), and most of all it was so compatible that I could send my schematic to just about anyone and they'd be able to read and print them.

My sister sometimes tried to convince me that LaTex is better. But why? The *.doc format does everything I need, it's simple, no learning curve.

I used HPGL only for file storage and import into the word processor. That worked very well, until Microsoft dropped HPGL import support :-(

Ok, by that time formats such as PNG had come out and those work very well, too.

Well, that's just the trick, with HPGL you didn't have to install anything. It just worked.

Yes, I might just go that route. Set up some batch file that whenever a slew of PS pages comes in it translates all to PDF. PDF viewers don't let you insert comment, usually. But I can convert to a more practical format such as PNG, then it's easy.

Why learn how to drive and maintain a Stanley Steamer when you can buy a nice gasoline-engine car everywhere?

Best of luck -- let us know if you find anything that works well. The problem is that PostScript is a full-blown computer language, so "importing it" amounts to writing a full-blown PostScript interpreter... which is a rather non-trivial undertaking (...look at the size of GhostScript...!).

Yes, although HPGL isn't a full-blown programming language... the "smarts" behind HPGL had to be in the program that generated it rather than the printer itself.

Granted, one might ask why a printer should have to be able to interpret something as fancy as PostScript in the first place, but people like Don Lancaster would have answers for you there. It was kinda cool back in the mid-'80s to early-'90s that you could have your one PostScript printer and write very simple programs to create complex plots more quickly and with much better quality than many of the common PCs of the day could readily generate themselves.

---Joel

"Jim Thompson" wrote in message news: snipped-for-privacy@4ax.com...

PaintShop Pro is now owned by Corel. They effectively bought out their competition!

Which version are you using?

---Joel

Hi Jörg,

That's only because MS don't really like Adobe :-) They wanted to push their own ttf.

Free PdfXchange does it definitely. I use it very often. It is my default PDF-Reader even on Linux using wine.

Marte

I just discovered that myself. Like OrCAD, if you can't compete, buy 'em out :-(

I have v8.10... quite old now, but works well. ...Jim Thompson

So far I can see the schematics in GSView. But converting them to PDF always results in a blank page. The circuitry is sort of gray, not black, and somehow that must be interpreted as white. And GSView seems to only be able to have one file open at a time so it'll be constant re-loading at the conf call this morning.

So it works but it does not work well.

I never understood why one needs a full-blown programming language to render a schematic :-)

For me Postscript was always what my former boss used to call "technology looking for a home".

Try printing out your PostScript files on a real printer running Adobe's licensed copy of PostScript, and I fully expect you'll have a very good, clean, proper image without anything messed up. The fact that trying to take a PostScript file and then import what's supposed to end up on paper into another program isn't really a downfall of the language itself -- it's a downfall of the PostScript "importer"... GhostScript, in your case.

I tend to agree with you there, although there is some utility in LaTeX if you end up writing a lot of book-length tomes that contain a lot of math. I was required to write my master's thesis in LaTeX, and it was probably just about a wash in terms of how much effort it would have been in Word vs. LaTeX... but if I had to write one-hundred-and-some-odd pages anew each year, I suspect by the 2nd or 3rd document LaTeX would end up being more productive. That's always been the promise of LaTeX vs. WYSIWYG: Yes, there's a rather longer initial learning period, but long-term there's supposed to be more of a payback.

That being said, I do think LaTeX is far more fragile than it should be in this day and age. It's just ridiculous that there are special rules for how you have to "protect" text that's going to be, e.g., the caption for a figure vs. what you'd do if you were just writing text in the body of your document. I also think the "payback" period of LaTeX has been getting longer and longer now that WYSISWYG word processors have started paying rather more attention to the idea of separating "document data" from "document formatting." (Ironically, it seems like the Internet and the success of CSS and XHTML motivated this far more than LaTeX ever did.)

There is -- some day -- supposed to be a "LaTeX 3" that addresses some of LaTeX 2e's problem. It was started about twenty years ago now... :-) -- I suspect it'll never be finished, again because there just aren't enough situations left where LaTeX is really worth it anymore.

---Joel

They all engage in turf protection, for example Adobe prefers that you send them a substantial chunk of money before they let you annotate PDF files. With other formats such as PNG that problem simply doesn't exist. For me as the end user only one thing counts, and that is whether it works with a reasonable effort of not. HPGL always did, PNG does right now, PS (so far) does not.

Ok, maybe I should switch then. But only after I have figured out a way to convert these PS files to PDF files that aren't just blank pages. However, first I am going to try to convince the IC guys to send in a more modern format such as PNG.

Isn't that a downfall for the language itself if it is so incompatible that you first have to buy another set of proprietary tools to make it work? It certainly means it hasn't made it into the mainstream, and in terms of PS I'd venture to say that it never will.

Ok, I wrote my thesis using IBM-EasyWriter. Yes, I am that old :-)

I have written module specs north of 50 pages starting in 1989 when I first became self-employed (and even before at ATL). Back then I used MS-Works at first, a few months later switched to MS-Word because it is so much more powerful. But mostly because I received chunks of text from clients in that format and it became clear that this would mutate into a de-facto industry standard. Scope plots, scanned-in stuff, chunks of schematics, whole schematics, all nicely imported. And this was the old DOS version 5.0. They looked really nice with TOC, indexing, footnotes, the whole nine yards.

Sometimes I get requests as to how I managed to insert a certain graph because it existed only on paper. The answer was the Logitech ScanMan. A few years ago I disassembled it, sad but it really isn't needed anymore. That thing worked like a charm.

Exactly. For some fancy type-setting it may have an advantage but I really can't see any compelling reason why an engineer would need anything more than what MS-Word or OpenOffice provide. Also, I often have to start a doc-file which is then integrated into a bigger document by my clients, sometimes hundreds of pages. They'd hurl their coffee mugs at me if I delivered LaTex because they wouldn't know what to do with it. Ask a few admins whether they know LaTex and many will likely respond that they are allergic to latex ;-)