On Mon, 17 Apr 2000, Valerie Sutton wrote:
> Actually the cost of around $300 is nothing when I know that the
> development of the original .PDF formatting and the development of the
> Postscript language itself cost them millions of dollars.
I get the impression that they've more than made up for those
costs by selling copies of Illustrator and other software based on
Postscript technology. But regardless, they've given Postscript and PDF
to the public as an open format, which allowed the development of
GhostScript.
> 3. I am thinking of contacting Adobe, once I know their program
> backwards and forwards, to ask them for an "arrangement" where we have
> licensing of some kind so that gives us permission to distribute Adobe
> Acrobat as a bundle with SignWriter 4.3...
Good luck! Acrobat Distiller is their main source of profit from
PDF, and I don't think that Adobe is good-hearted enough to give it away.
> 6. But there are still several issues on the Macintosh, because the
> Mac files go through a DOS emulator, either SoftPC or VirtualPC, and I
> have to see if "printing to a postscript file" is possible using those
> two programs on the Mac.
If SoftPC and VirtualPC are good emulators, it should be possible
to run the prn2file utility under them, since it makes no reference to
actual print queues outside of DOS. Note, also, that you have to exit
SignWriter and run prn2file again for each file you create.
> So if any of you know other programs, like GhostWriter, that can
> create these postscript files
I think that GhostScript is the best answer. It's licensed under
the GNU Public License, which means that it's free as long as you include
a copy of the source code. And you don't even need permission to
distribute it, as long as you don't charge anything more than the cost of
the distribution medium (on top of whatever you charge for your
SignWriter). It's also supposed to be faster and more versatile than
Acrobat Distiller.
I forgot to mention that Ghostscript comes with a batch file
called ps2pdf.bat. As long as it's in the DOS path, people can just run
that from their DOS windows: "ps2pdf test.ps test.pdf". That ought to cut
down on the need for documentation.
--
-Angus B. Grieve-Smith
Linguistics Department
University of New Mexico
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