Monochrome XIII
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re:Chess Fonts, Board, etc. - 2006/09/19 22:04
I sent this to Alan by email, but I thought I'd put it here too.
You can easily generate pdf files from postscript files using
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/
This saves the cost of buying Adobe's Acrobat Writer.
There may be better ways of doing it (I'm not a windoze fan), but if you install a printer driver for a postscript printer (you don't need to own such a printer), and get windoze to print to a file instead of the printer. Then convert the postscript file to pdf using ghostscript. There may be ways of printing directly to pdf files, I'm not sure.
I use ghostscript on a daily basis, but only on UNIX systems, so I don't have much experience in the windoze enviroment.
I've had a few experiences which make me think Ghostscript is better than Acrobat's pdf writer. These are a limited I admit, but Adobe's pdf writer has screwed up at times.
1) When I wrote my PhD thesis, Acrobat's pdf writer had problems in reading the postscript files generated by Wordperfect for DOS. It was very unrealiable in interpreting them. Someone suggested using
Ghostscript, and it worked fine.
See http://www.medphys.ucl.ac.uk/research/borl/homepages/davek/phd/phd.html if interested.
3) A colleage of mine, recently submitted her PhD thesis in a rush, as she had a new job in another country. She printed a copy for herself from Word, which looked fine. She also printed the thesis to pdf format, using the Adobe's Acrobat Writer plugin for Windoze. That allows Word to write directly to pdf files.
She then printed the copies for the examiners from that pdf file. So her copy and the examiners copy were printed from different files, which should have given idential results.
Unfortunately, the copies sent to the examiners from the pdf files had several difference between to those produced on the postscript printer by Word's printer driver.
So when the examiners said, we can't see the diagram on page X, she would say 'well its in my copy' Needless to say she had some corrections to do. Her thesis in online - whether or not she gave up with Adobe's plugin, or got it owrking better I do not know. But it proves Word's pdf writer (which needs the Adobe plugin) is not that good. Obviously, producing a 200 page thesis with lots of embedded diagrams and tables, demands a bit more of the software than a couple of page letter.
So if you want pdf files without paying for software, or you find
Adobe's software unrelieable, look at using Ghostscript and its front-end ghostview.
Dr. David Kirkby
BTW, I have no connection with the development of Ghostscript - just a happy user..
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Courage is not simply one of the virtues, but the form of every virtue at the testing point.
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