[Ghostscript and] GSview

Submit portable freeware that you find here. It helps if you include information like description, extraction instruction, Unicode support, whether it writes to the registry, and so on.
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payneCheng
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu May 24, 2007 12:04 am

[Ghostscript and] GSview

#1 Post by payneCheng »

GSview is a graphical interface for Ghostscript.
http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/

It asks for an installed Ghostscript,
but, in fact, I think it requires only settings of ABSOLUTE path to Ghostscript directory.

Based on the following information
http://yukongis.ca/bin/view/Main/GhostS ... Processing
I write a .bat file and a simple NSIS .exe to envoke GSview.

It dynamically sets environment variables before launching GSview, and it works.

payneCheng
Posts: 2
Joined: Thu May 24, 2007 12:04 am

#2 Post by payneCheng »

And I would post the procedures after passing more tests.

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uksamo
Posts: 8
Joined: Fri Jan 11, 2008 11:25 am

GSview 4.9 and Ghostscript 8.60 Portable

#3 Post by uksamo »

FYI,

I've managed to get GSview 4.9 and Ghostscript 8.6 to run as portable apps with only a little juggling of files and haven't noticed any problems. It also works without changing any environment paths, the following should get it working:

1) Download both the apps from http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/
- Note that I've only tried the win32 versions.

2) Both downloads are self executing zip files, rather than executing them use a program such as 7-Zip portable and extract both GSview (gsv49w32.exe) and GhostScript (gs860w32.exe) to a new directory.

Your folder layout should look like this:

New Folder
     ├───gs860w32
     │      ├───fonts
     │      └───gs8.60
     │              ├───bin
     │              ├───doc
     │              ├───examples
     │              ├───lib
     │              └───Resource
     │                      ├───CMap
     │                      ├───ColorSpace
     │                      ├───Decoding
     │                      └───Encoding
     └───gsv49w32
             ├───gsview
             └───pstotext

3) Open up the ".\gs860w32" folder and move both the "fonts" and "gs8.60" folders to the "..\gsv49w32" folder. You can then delete the "gs860w32" folder and its remaining files.

Your folder structure should now look like this:

New Folder
     └───gsv49w32
             ├───fonts
             ├───gs8.60
             │      ├───bin
             │      ├───doc
             │      ├───examples
             │      ├───lib
             │      └───Resource
             │              ├───CMap
             │              ├───ColorSpace
             │              ├───Decoding
             │              └───Encoding
             ├───gsview
             └───pstotext

4) That should be about it, to test it run the "GSviewPortable.exe" located within the "gsv49w32" folder. It should work fine and automatically locate GhostScript as it's within it's own folder.

5) The only remain steps is a little house keeping. I renamed the "gsv49w32" folder to something more appropriate like "GSview Portable". I also deleted the "setup.exe" file as it's not needed and also so my "PortableApps Menu" didn't add it to its application list. I also renamed the "GSviewPortable.exe", again so it appeared better named within the "PortableApps menu". If your tight for space deleting the doc folder within the "gs8.60" folder will reduce the app by around 8mb.

I hope helps anyone that finds PDF portability and manipulation useful. Any problems please let me know.

Kindest Regards,
Richard

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Simon.T
Posts: 375
Joined: Sat Feb 03, 2007 10:07 am
Location: Palestine

Well done!

#4 Post by Simon.T »

@uksamo
hhmmm... I roughly know about what U 2 R talking about, but I must say that this is one very simple, and impressive scheme :)

Very well done uksamo!

(I'm definitely going to use this in the future!!)

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Midas
Posts: 6705
Joined: Mon Dec 07, 2009 7:09 am
Location: Sol3

Re: [Ghostscript and] GSview

#5 Post by Midas »

Very old topic update: while I haven't tested any of the above, Ghostscript is a tried and tested PDF engine underlying numerous freeware and FLOSS projects -- namely the closely related MuPDF -- and a strong alternative for more commercial oriented Adobe products.

Moreover, Ghostscript remains in active development, with a recent v9.56.1 released 2022-04-04 that switches to a new C-based PDF interpreter (while maintaining the old PostScript one for the time being).
Ghostscript is an interpreter for the PostScript® language and PDF files. It is available under either the GNU GPL Affero license or licensed for commercial use from Artifex Software, Inc. It has been under active development for over 30 years and has been ported to several different systems during this time. Ghostscript consists of a PostScript interpreter layer and a graphics library. There are a family of other products, including GhostPCL, GhostPDF, and GhostXPS that are built upon the same graphics library. Between them, this family of products offers native rendering of all major page description languages. Our latest product, GhostPDL, pulls all these languages into a single executable.

Ghostscript latest release can be downloaded from https://www.ghostscript.com/releases/gsdnld.html.

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