PM PDF (Poor Mans PDF) or Presentation Manager PDF (whatever !) 03-05-2000 Please don't make a Hero of me it was only 20 lines of Code :-) Needing to get rid of my win95 machine just to create PDF's I decided to find a more 'workable' solution. During my search I ran into Poor Mans Distiller Distill.zip at hobbes. The idea was actually pretty good but it was just tying a lot of seperate programs together. I decided to write a Port Driver (*.pdr) for this purpose. q. Why a port driver and not a Printer Driver ?? a. at first I couldn't get the ddk Printer Driver samples to Compile :-) b. Port Drivers are easier to make c. You could now use any PS printer and backup your printed docs with PDF d. The idea was to redirect the output of a PS printer, so a portdriver is the way to do that. e. you could install the port driver on a LAN server with a PostScript printer shared for all clients and then have all your LAN documents be printed to PDF (needs the next version of PMPDF (0.2.x), no need to install GhostScript everywhere. Requirements: (now differ from version to version) PDFWRITE.PDR (no instalation Support !!!) - PSCRIPT.DRV, from IBM Device Driver site - GhostScript v6.x (tested with 6.0 and 6.01) (can be found on Hobbes) - EMX 0.9d (for GhostScript) PMPDF.WPI - WarpIn of at least v0.9.2 (http://warpin.netlabs.org) - GhostScript v6.x (tested with 6.0 and 6.01) (can be found on Hobbes) - EMX 0.9d (for GhostScript) PMPDFGS.WPI - WarpIn of at least v0.9.2 (http://warpin.netlabs.org) - EMX 0.9d (for GhostScript) Installation all: - Download PMPDFGS.WPI or PMPFD.WPI, the first contians GhostScript - open WPI by double clicking on in the Folder - look and read, and choose path where to install PMPDF.WPI - make sure that you enter the correct directory of 'GSOS2.EXE' ! - 'copy fontmap.os2 fontmap' in GhostScript 'Lib' Directory - Done ! When you print to this new printer you'll be asked for a filename and it will be written to the given pdfs directory. You should now be able to read the output file with Acrobat reader. Future plans: - Automatic filenames: pdf name generated from spooler document title - A real PDF Writer, no more need for GhostScript (could use a hand on that) Please feel free to contact me at pmpdf@egroups.com Sources are available at Netl@bs and can be downloaded as all the other great stuff at Netl@bs! P.s. the driver was tested on a Dutch System so maybe the English dialog titles mentioned in the install section are correct, if not please let me know. Keep in mind that this version doesn't work with versions of GhostScript prior to 6.0! v0.1.11 Changes: - The biggest problem still is the installation of the damned thing ! - Created two WarpinArchives: PMPDF.WPI: - GhostScript v6.x needs to be installed and working - a path for your PDF files need to exist - if you type the path of your 'GSOS2.EXE' and PDF's correctly it should be 'Fool Proof' PMPDFGS.WPI - as above, only contains GhostScript v6.01 - a path for your PDF files need to exist - if you type the path of your PDF's correctly it should be 'Fool Proof' - really 'Fool Proof' regarding GS - Support for the PDFWRITE.PDR manual installation discontinued its updated on the site only but if you don't know how to install it don't use it :-)) v0.1.9 Changes: - Finaly correct error handling, Driver gives some sort of 'reason' why the processing fails at least it should not crash you Spooler anymore - added Diagnostic string to pdfwrite.msg in your temporary path, which would make problem solving for me easier - fixed bug with semicolon ';' on manual install of port-driver v0.1.7 Changes: - updated for GS 6.01 (Bart van Leeuwen, Jan van der Heide) - 'TEMP' also added for autodetection of temporary work dir (Jan van der Heide) - pick root of bootdrive if TMP and TEMP both don't exist (Jan van der Heide) - corrected typos and updated doc's (Jan van der Heide) v0.1.3 Changes: -various typos corrected (Klaus Staedtler,Michael Reinsch) -temporary file is now stored in 'TMP' path (Joachim Benjamins) -Serial initialization values are replaced by default PMPDF values -Better layout of Dialogbox (just makeup) -Correct Handling of Abort routine (didn't do anything before :-) ) -Code cleanup, unused funtions and definitions removed -PostScript optimalization to produce better quality and lower file size ! thanks to procedure by: James Gasson v0.1.1 (Initial Release) 30-9-1999 Known Isues: - not every document is converted correctly, this is a GhostScript Issue Contact: Please feel free to contact me at bart@netage.nl ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/tools/pmpdf Sources: At Warpstock I learned that I'm probably not allowed to opensource the source because of licence agreement of the DDK from which this driver is created, until everything about that is clear there will be no sources available sorry.