[thelist] Non-Adobe PDF authoring software

George Dillon george.dillon at ukonline.co.uk
Wed Oct 18 05:55:17 CDT 2000


> Anyone know if this has been done?

Yes.  I too baulked at the cost of Distiller, and remembering a tip on
this list from several months back, hunted down this (PC) solution:

There's a FREEWARE program called Ghostscript which converts
Postscript printer files into PDFs.

To make it more useable you also need to get (and configure) another
freebie called RedMon, which redirects files from your designated PS
printer to Ghostscript.  If you're using Windows 9x, then the whole
installation, configuration and operation is made simpler by another
freebie called FreePDF and its configuration document.

So this is what you need... (if in doubt, get the FreePDF config guide
and read that first)

GHOSTSCRIPT 6.23
http://download.sourceforge.net/ghostscript/gs623w32.zip
(3,123 kb)

RedMon (Printer port REDirection Monitor)
ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/ghost/ghostgum/redmon15.zip

that's the official URL, but I found it didn't work, so try

ftp://ftp.sunsite.org.uk/Mirrors/ftp.tex.ac.uk/tex-archive/support/gho
stscript/ghostgum/redmon15.zip

and mind the wrap!
(583 kb)

FreePDF -- v0.94 Beta
http://www.webxd.com/zipguy/fpdfz095ExeOnly.exe
(610 kb)

FreePDF Configuration Guide
http://www.webxd.com/zipguy/newconfg.pdf
(197kb)

Getting it to recognise and embed all the ttfs on your system is a bit
tricky so please don't come back to me asking how to do it, cos I can't
remember.  I know it's possible, but to get started (I found) you also need
to download the font files, which are NOT included with Ghostscript
(contrary to the docs)...

Ghostscript fonts
ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/ghost/aladdin/fonts/gs600fn1.zip
ftp://ftp.cs.wisc.edu/ghost/aladdin/fonts/gs600fn2.zip
(1,440 & 1,202 kb)

This won't create the document menu thingy, but I recall somewhere on the
forum at  zipguy's site a thread about how to manually create the Postscript
codes to do this... but I maybe talking crap here ;)

HTH

George Dillon







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