[Info-vax] Ghostscript and HTML Browser on X86

[Phillip Helbig undress to reply]

In article <e85497bb-697f-4401-bd1a-cd07de2d4bc7n at googlegroups.com>,
Andreas Gruhl <gruhl at isidata.dewrites: 

> Here comes a real life question:
> 
> We have successfully ported our first application (Planning for public
> transport companies, 1.6 Mio Lines of Pascal) to X86. 
> 
> But: the application generates HTML and Postscript files. On Alpha and
> Itanium we can directly show these to the user via an old Mozilla
> browser and via Ghostview/Ghostscript. The browser is automatically
> launched by our application and directed to the correct page. Everything
> works just fine. 
> 
> Where can we get an equivalent of these display products for X86? 

Yes!  A modern browser for VMS on x86 is a real-life question!  (It is 
probably also a real life question.)

> Well, we have Sourcecode for Ghostscript and will try to build it - it
> doesn't look easy though. 

GhostScript builds on Alpha.  What are the problems on x86?  Do you have 
a proper compiler?

> But we see no chance of raising an HTML browser on X86. We do not need
> all the latest bells and whistles. The software might be 10 years of age
> or even older - if it can be built on Alpha or Itanium, we could try
> building it on X86, provided we had access to the source code. 

There must be some publicly available source code for old VMS broswers 
on Alpha.

> Any suggestions are welcome. Thank you. 

Perhaps marginally related: I heard recently that GhostScript is 
dropping support for PostScript or something like that.  Also, I think 
that the PostScript source is now publicly available.

For various reasons, people are moving to directly-generated PDF.

I like PostScript, especially when produced via my Fortran program.  I 
plan to continue to use it.  But those who do so should make sure that 
they have a method to convert to PDF.