Date: Sat, 1 Jul 2000 16:59:54 -0400 From: Garance A Drosihn <drosih@rpi.edu> To: Chuck Robey <chuckr@picnic.mat.net> Cc: arch@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: was: Bringing LPRng into FreeBSD? Message-ID: <v0421013bb583fb9fbf97@[128.113.24.47]> In-Reply-To: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0006302200040.4585-100000@picnic.mat.net> References: <Pine.BSF.4.21.0006302200040.4585-100000@picnic.mat.net>
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At 10:01 PM -0400 6/30/00, Chuck Robey wrote:
> > I'm a bit spaced out right now, but offhand I don't see why
> > ghostscript would be needed for converting anything (except
> > PDF) into postscript. [...] I would be inclined to use
> > something like netpbm to get GIF images INTO postscript.
> > Not ghostscript.
>
>Were you aware that most of the netpbm things that go into
>postscript CALL ghostscript? In fact, since you say you've
>been printing jpegs and gifs for a long time, go a look (a
>closer one) at the executeables you've been using. How do
>they do it?
I am not completely aware of how netpbm works, but I am fairly
certain I have never (*) installed ghostscript. Thus, it REALLY
did seem to me that ghostscript should not be required to get
gif's into PS. I have now looked into this some more.
I am doing some vmware testing now, so I did a fresh install
of freebsd-4-stable in a new virtual machine. I then installed
bash2, rsaref (for openssh) and netpbm. netpbm did install a
few other things, none of which was ghostscript. If netpbm DOES
require ghostscript, then the Makefile in the netpbm port needs
to be fixed. My guess is that the Makefile is fine.
I then did:
cd /usr/local/share/doc/tiff/images
giftopnm cat.gif | pnmtops > /tmp/cat.ps
scp -p /tmp/cat.ps gad@my.nextstation:
All the postscript-aware programs on my NeXTstation believe this
produced a perfectly valid postscript file of some sort of tiger.
On the virtual-machine where I did this conversion, 'find' tells
me there is no executable version of either 'ghostscript' or 'gs'
anywhere in '/usr'. And even though that .gif file is in a
directory called 'tiff/images', the file command does assure me
that the file really is a GIF image (version 89a).
So, whatever I am or am not aware of, I am now pretty confident that
my original hunch was correct. For the specific task of converting
GIF files into postscript, it is pretty much certain that there is
no requirement for Ghostscript. Now, lprNG or apsfilter may very
well DECIDE to use ghostscript when printing gif images, and may
have good reasons for doing that. But if so, then that is due to
other issues, and not because ghostscript is somehow required for
the simple task of converting gif images into valid postscript.
Mind you, my original hunch wasn't really all that important of a
topic to discuss, and I feel a little embarrassed that it resulted
in this much discussion... It was just that it struck me as so
incredibly odd that ghostscript would be used for that specific
task that I felt compelled to ask for more details. I probably
should have just gone home to bed, instead... :-)
- - - - - -
(*) - Okay, as luck would have it, I DID install ghostscript on my
real machine just last night. Really though, I only *meant* to
try out Gnome, but it turned out that making gnome also made
about fifty other things, one of which was ghostscript. ARG!!
So, the "never" isn't strictly true, but hey, it WAS true just
last week!
---
Garance Alistair Drosehn = gad@eclipse.acs.rpi.edu
Senior Systems Programmer or drosih@rpi.edu
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
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