For Angus and any others interested:
I printed out your (Angus Grieve-Smith's) original "how-to" message
(Friday, April 14, 2000. Thank you, thank you, thank you.) and started
over, having tried to follow the included instruction file that came
with prn2file.com unsuccessfully.
I find that I was trying to use the instruction or switch /Pn2 vice /P2.
My guess is that I can follow a properly cited example more correctly
than a straight instruction. After all these years, one would think that
I could read simple shareware-ese. In its proper syntax, of course, it
worked just fine.
I am using prn2file, Ghostscript 6.01 and Ghostview on a K6-II/133 with
Windows 98.
So far I have only had time to experiment with one file, Pastor
Dettloff's easter.sgn. Since we have it displayed on the web, I wanted
to compare the resultant .pdf with the .gif images of the .sgn file that
we are currently using. Somewhere along the line, I think in the SW4.3
print to postscript process, the file is inverted to black on white,
and the .pdf pages seem a lot smaller, without the separating lines
between the rows. In this case, I think Pastor Dettloff has a point in
that without the separating lines, it is easier to read columns. If one
did not have to scroll up and down a page numerous times in the browser,
that would be a better display to work with. I will try to display a
comparison page using the .pdf instead of .gif images soon.
I have noticed that the resultant pages seem pretty full. Is there a
way to change that without going into signwriter itself and putting
spaces in manually, such as causing the page to only contain half the
volume of print it has now? I know in case of this particular .sgn file
that it would make the .pdf 18 pages long vice 9, but I think the
instant readability (as opposed to having to use the zoom feature and
scrolling) would be improved.
Some of the printed "typed paragraphs" had some defective (although
readable) letters, and I suspect this is due to the font in the
signwriter program not converting well to postscript.
I noticed that the resultant .pdf file is about one fourth the size of
the original .ps file. I started with a .ps of around 680K and ended
with a .pdf file of about 150k.
One thing I observed in Ghostview, when it tries to follow a normal link
that was made in the Adobe program on a menu page, it does nothing,
although this is not significant since we have Acrobat available, which
does follow the link properly. Otherwise, Ghostview and Ghostscript are
great to work with and seem to have a lot of flexibility for free
programs!
Also my apologies to the writer of Ghostscript for my having called it
Ghostwriter, although I'm sure I meant it in the same vernacular as when
the proper title was originally applied.
Valerie, I will make space available on our ftp site for any .pdf format
dictionaries folks want to place there to be available for download to
others, and advertise each dictionary on our ftp selection page on the
SignBible Site. Any that are ready to load, please attach to a personal
email and send to me.
Jerry
https://cyberjer.com
https://cyberjer.com/signbibl/
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