Generating PDFs on RISC OS | Drobe.co.uk archives

Generating PDFs on RISC OS

By Chris Williams. Published: 8th Apr 2003, 12:56:35 | Permalink | Printable

Mark Rowan's mini-howto

We've blatantly torn this from Announce but we think it's useful and worth bringing to your attention. Mark Rowan has written up a gentle guide to setting up your RISC OS computer to produce PDF files, a very popular portable file format. PDF files are documents that can be created and read on many different computer systems. A PDF file produced on a Windows PC can be read, for example, on a RISC OS computer (using the RISC OS PDF viewer). Similarly, a PDF document produced on a RISC OS computer can be printed on a Windows PC.

Mark's guide allows RISC OS users to 'print out' native documents, such as Artworks files and Ovation Pro files, sending the output to separate freely available software that converts the output into a PDF file, rather than sending the output to a printer. We've tested his guide and were able to follow it to sucessfully produce several PDF files. One little snag we found was that you need the PDriverPDF module, which is installed as part of Taborca (available here).

Links

PDF generation on RISC OS

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Discussion

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Or you could just buy RiScript...

robert79 on 8/4/03 1:09PM
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Is it any good?

Chris, drobe.co.uk

diomus on 8/4/03 1:22PM
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RiScript is mostly excellent, although it doesn't do clipping or CMYK... yet. They were talking about adding in a pinch of Vantage technology to sort this out.

Does Mark's method allow you to create CMYK output? Essential for professional printing. -- Michael Stubbs, Leeds

arenaman on 8/4/03 2:22PM
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Mark's method allows you to create PDFs for free, nothing more :-)

If you want user support, a manual and fancy features, a commercial product will be often required.

It's just like Socketeer (freeware) vs. Dialup2 (R-Comp's commercial app).

Chris, drobe.co.uk

diomus on 8/4/03 2:38PM
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robert: uhm, let us think, free vs you have to pay money... no question really..

Me Sadly could not get it to work, though...

skock on 8/4/03 2:38PM
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RiScript isn't much money though, and I've always found the free PDF generators to be more hassle than the few quid saved is worth, IMHO.

robert79 on 8/4/03 6:20PM
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RiScript is also a slightly more competent PDF viewer than !PDF, though !PDF is many times faster (especially since RiScript must run through Aemulor on my machine). As a result, I find myself using !PDF a *lot* more now. I have to agree with robert79 that (to me) the small amount that RiScript costs is worth its ease of use. -- Simon Wilson, Boulder, Colorado

ksattic on 8/4/03 6:37PM
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If anyone is prepared to put some work in I have ported a 32-bit compatible ClibPDF - a C library for constructing PDF files. Get it from [link]

GavinWraith on 8/4/03 7:09PM
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RiScript may be cheap for you, but it is not when you have to multiply the price by 12 to get it in your currency

skock on 9/4/03 10:46AM
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Unfortunately !PDF doesn't like the PDFs I throw at it, they contain a lot of maths! Noone seems to have mentioned GhostScript, which can be used to convert PDFs to PS files and then use GView to display them as well as generate PDFs. I've had a look at RiScript and I think the comparison between Socketeer Vs. Dialup2 is flawed. It is much better than that. Make a few adjustments to the default config and couple it with SpecialFX and the display is lovely even when LaTeX fonts are embedded.

-- James Carey

jmcarey on 9/4/03 11:53PM
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Unfortunatly the TaborcaGS info on the afformentioned page isn't very clear in itself either. Since it doesn't mention which printers it should work with. The PDF/bin file gives an error in Printers 1.54 (the ROM based one in ROS3.7). Which is also the reason why the TaborcaGS scripts don't work. It's also unclear if you need that Taborca demo. In that respect this is not a very good effort. I guess I'll stick to the ps2pdf-command from ghostscript for now :-(

EPDM on 12/4/03 11:40PM
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