** 1 page PD/Shareware review / 840 words **

Ghostscript v5.10

With manufacturers abandoning paper manuals in favour of the Adobe Acrobat PDF (Portable Document Format) where does that leave Atarians? Derryck Croker checks out this rejuvenated Ghostscript release which supports PDF printing and viewing...

Ghostscript has been one of the few options available to Atarians to print and display Postscript and Encapsulated Postscript files but it has always been tricky to install and configure which has limited its appeal.

This release put together by Christian Felsch, the qed developer, has taken Tim Sullivan's original Atari port of the publicly available GNU Postscript viewer sources, added the latest widgets and used the very latest sources, which includes a slew of new printer drivers, resulting in a much more user friendly package.

Installation

Ghostscript uses modules to handle various aspects of its operation and confusingly these have the PS file extender which is normally reserved for PostScript files so I'd recommend moving the demo Postscript files into a folder of their own then making sure the paths in the GEMGS.CFG file reflect the actual location of the modules and fonts folders - edit them to suit using an ASCII text editor. Further options to set the font and size of the Console window can be set within the program and saved back to this file.

Users of previous releases may miss the ability to set the default output device, which now has to be set each time the program is run, but I'm sure most people won't miss the help files - which are no longer needed because the program is so easy to use.

Near identical PostScript fonts from different sources often have similar but different fontnames (different type foundry, non-commercial variants of commercial fonts etc). To handle these differences the FONTMAP file can be configured to alias fontnames to font files. The supplied FONTMAP file will get you up and running but most users will want to configure this to their own requirements.

Ghostscript is supplied as a GTP (GEM Takes Parameters) application and I have have my copy installed as a viewer for PS, EPS and PDF files in CAB.
Being a GTP program can cause problems with some desktops. For example, MagXDesk users should rename the executable with an APP extender - which then loses the ability to have options set in the command line.

Camera, lights, action!

GhostScript is divided into Viewer or Output sections, select Open... from the File menu brings the Viewer section into play. Files are displayed in a GEM window while a separate Console window displays which font is being loaded and reports any errors encountered.

Ghostscript displayed all the PS and EPS files I tried without problems but I did experience some PDF files which reported wildly inaccurate page counts in the Console window - one such file, which I knew contained 319 pages, reported just ten pages and flatly refused to display any more! Happily there's a work-around using the more up-to-date Output module.

The Output dialog uses popups to select the source file, printer driver or output file format and the resolution. Amongst the supported output file formats is "pswrite" and selecting this option with my problem PDF file as the source resulted in a Postscript file containing all the pages - I recommend ticking the No pause menu item and leaving the computer to its own devices while the document is processed! The resulting document can be viewed in the Viewer section with no apparent memory problems even if the file is huge. I would caution against using the graphics file format drivers because the destination file is overwritten on loading the next page. However PDF files can be output directly using one of the many built-in printer drivers.

Conclusion

Despite problems with the PDF viewer module which will persist until a more up-to-date source file is released and incorporated into Ghostscript, its range of input and output file formats outstrips anything previously available on the Atari platform including former commercial options like CompoScript. Bearing in mind Ghostscript is free and features a Drag&Drop front end, non-blocking windows and popups and you're onto a winner.

** product boxout **
Ghostscript v5.10

Status:
Freeware

System:
All Ataris, 2Mb memory minimum and ST-high (640x400) resolution or higher, hard drive recommended.

Availability:
English documentation and RSC files for both the ST and TT versions of Ghostscript are available from:

** BC **
http://www.cix.co.uk/~derryck/software.htm,
The full package can be downloaded from the author's web site at:
http://www.tu-harburg.de/~smcf1605/
** /BC **

Ghostscript is also available from any BBS connected to the FANFiles network.

Contact:
Christian_Felsch@hh.maus.de (no emails greater than 16Kb)

Pros
Modern interface, free!

Cons
Workaround may be needed for viewing some PDF files, most options have to be reset each time the program is run

79%
** /product boxout **


** Captions **
** GSCONSOL.GIF **
Whilst it's possible to program Ghostscript by typing commands in at the GS> prompt, it's much easier to use the GEM front end

** ESCHER.GIF **
And this IMG format file of an Escher painting from a PostScript file is the result