| | <<<Back 1 day (to 2012/12/07) | 2012/12/08 |
| JakeSays | is there a windows printer driver that embeds ghostscript? i seem to recall something about mswinpr.drv | 03:15.04 |
| | but i can't find its source anywhere | 03:15.11 |
| ray_laptop | JakeSays: The ghostscript 'mswinpr2' device uses a Windows printer driver to OUTPUT data converted from PostScript or PDF. On the other hand, if you want to be able to "print" to ghostscript, for instance to create a PDF from a Windows APP... | 04:10.53 |
| | JakeSays: then what you want is any of several free PDF printer drivers that use ghostscript to convert from PostScript that the Microsoft PSCRIPT5.DLL (generic PostScript printer) driver emits. | 04:12.05 |
| JakeSays | ray_laptop: what i'm really after is a printer driver i can study. i need to write a windows printer driver that will 'print' to a custom document format | 04:12.23 |
| ray_laptop | JakeSays: when ghostscript outputs to the mswinpr2, it is acting as an application, not a driver. | 04:13.29 |
| JakeSays | ray_laptop: hmm. so mswinpr2 isn't an actual printer driver? | 04:14.46 |
| ray_laptop | JakeSays: Unless you have the Microsoft driver development kit (DDK) I don't know of simple examples. I have done some Windows drivers (years ago) prior to the Vista/Win7 XPS based printing system. | 04:15.07 |
| JakeSays | ray_laptop: yeah i have the ddk. i also did printer driver work, but it was back in win 3.1 | 04:15.51 |
| | so my memory is a bit rusty | 04:16.00 |
| ray_laptop | JakeSays: no. mswinpr2 just makes calls to output to a printer. The source is in gs/base/gdevwpr2.c | 04:16.17 |
| JakeSays | xps would be awesome, but its not supported on old xp machines | 04:16.45 |
| ray_laptop | for the mswinpr2 ghostscript device, gs just makes a bitmap and outputs that using GDI calls to whatever printer is selected | 04:17.15 |
| JakeSays | ah ok, so yeah mswinpr2 isn't what i'm after | 04:17.43 |
| | hmm. although i could probably prototype using svg. maybe print to ps, convert to svg | 04:19.50 |
| ray_laptop | JakeSays: if what you want is to print to a certain type of printer, you may be able to write a ghostscript device (or modify an existing one) then use Redmon as your port monitor and install a 'PostScript' printer (what Windows thinks is a PS printer) -- then your gs device formats the data on the back end | 04:20.10 |
| | JakeSays: what are you trying to get _to_ | 04:20.34 |
| JakeSays | ray_laptop: capture printed forms and extract data from them | 04:21.08 |
| ray_laptop | JakeSays: Oh. Ghostscript can do that -- maybe without even needing a custom device. What data are you trying to get ? text ? | 04:22.06 |
| JakeSays | ray_laptop: text and its x,y position | 04:22.34 |
| ray_laptop | Ghostscript has a 'txtwrite' device | 04:22.47 |
| JakeSays | and maybe some line data for context, etc | 04:22.51 |
| | hmm | 04:23.04 |
| ray_laptop | JakeSays: see http://http://www.ghostscript.com/doc/9.06/Devices.htm | 04:23.58 |
| | section 4.6 describes the 'txtwrite' device | 04:24.26 |
| | JakeSays: -dTextFormat=0 is probably what you want | 04:25.05 |
| | Format 0 is intended for use by developers and outputs XML-escaped Unicode along with information regarding the format of the text (position, font name, point size, etc). | 04:25.26 |
| JakeSays | ray_laptop: ah yeah. that would work perfectly! | 04:25.31 |
| | xml even! | 04:25.54 |
| ray_laptop | why not -- everything else is XML it seems | 04:26.36 |
| | (or claims to be) | 04:26.50 |
| JakeSays | that will make prototyping extremely easy | 04:26.59 |
| ray_laptop | right | 04:27.06 |
| | good luck. | 04:27.15 |
| JakeSays | ray_laptop: thanks for the help! | 04:27.26 |
| ray_laptop | I'm going to head to dinner, but I'll check the logs here when I get back to see if you've had other questions. | 04:28.10 |
| JakeSays | ray_laptop: sounds good. thanks | 04:28.20 |
| ray_laptop | you are welcome | 04:28.28 |
| robin_watts_mac | hey henrys | 05:36.26 |
| | Have you arrived? | 05:36.29 |
| | For the benefit of ray_laptop and henrys: The plan is to meet tomorrow for breakfast at 8:30 | 05:40.03 |
| JakeSays | ray_laptop: that worked perfectly! no need for a custom print driver :) | 05:47.19 |
| ray_laptop | hi, robin_watts | 05:53.23 |
| | JakeSays: great ! | 05:53.34 |
| JakeSays | ray_laptop: do you have a sense of how difficult it would be to extend the text device to also detect/output long vertical and horizontal lines? | 05:53.36 |
| robin_watts_mac | hi ray | 05:53.59 |
| ray_laptop | JakeSays: well, there are several ways applications draw lines. Adding a txtwrite_stroke_path and/or txtwrite_fill_path proc to the device's procs would catch most of them. Then you just have to analyze the path. | 05:55.39 |
| JakeSays | ray_laptop: sounds like it'd be easy enough to test:) | 05:57.26 |
| ray_laptop | JakeSays: but I've seen STOOPID Excel output that does vertical lines as a column of thousands of short lines, where the length of the short line is the width of what ends up looking like a vertical line. | 05:57.37 |
| JakeSays | damn | 05:57.53 |
| | well fortunately the scope of the application output i have to support is very limited | 05:58.19 |
| henrys | ray_laptop and I ate at knuckles, no fine dining for us slobs | 05:58.21 |
| ray_laptop | and other apps sometimes do lines as images. But if you have a constrained set of apps that generate the data, you can customize it | 05:58.31 |
| JakeSays | right | 05:58.40 |
| | heh. we do have a few apps that output selective fields as images to make our capture process harder | 05:59.20 |
| henrys | robin_watts_mac: thanks for getting the email to me. | 06:00.18 |
| ray_laptop | JakeSays: the "trace" devices can be used to see what the application is generating once it percolates through the parser/graphics_lib into device proc calls. "tr_mono" (base/gdevtrac.c) might make it simpler for you to see what you need to do | 06:03.08 |
| | JakeSays: If you want to use the trace devices, you need to add them to the DEVICE_DEVS list in psi/msvc.mak -- just add it to the end of DEVICE_DEVS2= ... $(DD)tracedev.dev | 06:10.50 |
| | JakeSays: unfortunately, since the tr_ devices aren't used, it seems that it has bit-rotted. | 06:11.19 |
| robin_watts_mac | henrys: np. | 06:11.47 |
| robin_watts_mac | beds. | 06:12.11 |
| ray_laptop | g'nite, robin_watts | 06:12.40 |
| | the internet at this hotel (Hyatt Burlingame) really sucks | 06:23.11 |
| | Miles just changed breakfast to 8:30 (I thought it was 9:00) | 06:26.37 |
| | I better get my beauty sleep ;-) | 06:26.56 |
| JakeSays | ray_laptop: i just encountered a pdf that outputs every char as 0xffff - example: <char bbox="397 333 400 333" c=""> | 06:43.25 |
| kens | JakeSays the txtwrite device is very new if you find problems with it please report them on Bugzilla, along with a file which exhibits the problem and a command line and I'll take a look at it. | 13:10.31 |
| Pure | Hi. | 17:14.34 |
| robin_watts_mac | Hi | 17:14.45 |
| Pure | I'm trying to print via CUPS and I get this message on lpstat -p | 17:14.51 |
| | /usr/lib/cups/filter/gstoraster failed | 17:14.53 |
| | Is this a GS problem now? | 17:15.05 |
| robin_watts_mac | You probably need to speak to tkamppeter_ - that sounds like a cups issue. | 17:15.20 |
| chrisl | Pure: gstoraster is a cups "product". Your problem may be a gs issue at its core, but it will need to go to the cups people so they can tell us exactly how to reproduce the issue in Ghostscript. | 17:17.30 |
| Pure | I've been trying to get this to work for two hours, heh. | 17:17.33 |
| tkamppeter | Pure2, you need to switch CUPS to debug logging mode (command line "cupsctl LogLevel=debug"), then clear the queue ("cancel -a") and print the failing job again, this way you get much more info in error_log. | 21:13.24 |
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