Free PDF Background
Free PDF Background
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To understand what Free PDF is, what it does, and why it's hard to configure, you need to understand what the other programs do and the process involved. Please forgive the ZipGuy while he waxes and wanes, You patience is appreciated
The Quest for Free PDF's
It took a long time to find a way to do this. In order to make Free PDF's what was needed was a free program which can read output from Windows programs and write PDFs. This is not what Free PDF does. The ZipGuy does have a life... But after much searching (for years) the ZipGuy found that there is indeed a free (Mulitplatform!) program which can read printer output and write PDF (format)..
Holy Grail Mysteriously, the author of this program does not tout it's capabilities.
Aladdin's Ghostscript description:
In simple terms, this means that Ghostscript can read a PostScript or PDF file and display the results on the screen or convert them into a form you can print on a non-PostScript printer. Especially together with several popular previewers, with Ghostscript you can view or print an entire document or even isolated pages, even if your computer doesn't have Display PostScript and your printer doesn't handle PostScript itself.
After reading this one might think "This PDF Output Module sounds interesting!" Most of the Windows user community uses PCL (Hewlett Packard's Page Control Language) for printer output, and furthermore don't know nor care, that that is what they are doing. These users don't use PostScript at all. The site description in the PDFZone Webring is even more interesting it says: "Ghostscript home page - The Ghostscript home page contains links to a variety of freely available PostScript and PDF tools. These tools include the ability to view, print, and rasterize PostScript and PDF files, and to convert ("distill") PostScript to PDF and vice versa. They do not require any Acrobat product -- they are independent implementations of much of the Acrobat functionality. In addition to b" Anyway, This is the holy grail in the search for a method for creating Free PDFs!
Unfortunately the ZipGuy never happens to have handy PostScript Output files lying around.
Hmmm... Printing can create PostScript... What If we LIE to Windows?
Approach So what we need to do from any Windows application is to create PostScript output and pump it through Ghostscript to produce PDF output. Easier said than done. Basically, what we do is install a printer into Windows (lie) that uses PostScript (regardless that we don't have such a printer). It is recommended to use the 'Apple LaserWriter II NT' PS Driver' for this purpose, EVEN THOUGH WE DON'T HAVE THIS PRINTER! This is KEY! This printer driver comes with Win9x and produces PS output. We're ready for our first try... First Try
We could now configure this printer to print to "FILE: (Creates a file on disk)" and we have our PS file which Ghostscript can convert. We can use GSview (the Windows graphical front-end for Ghostscript) to convert this file into a PDF. This WORKS, but is kludgy and awkward in practice. The Steps Involved would be:
7 steps... Kind of tedious and messy..We can do better than that... Lets try again
What we need is something to kick off at step 2 and take us to step 4 and
tell it the name of the PS file.
REDMON RedMon is a program by Russell Lang. This program again is intended for other uses but will meet out needs nicely. It lets you create a "redirected" port to which you can map printer(s). This "redirected" port is watched in the background by a program which can intercept the output. When a printer prints output to this port, instead of sending the output to a printer as usual, the background RedMon Program captures the output (in our case containing PS), runs any program you like, and pumps the PS stream to that called program using something called 'pipes'. So we install RedMon. It lets us create a magic "redirected" port to which we can have the our Apple printer print. Cool! Whenever it prints, it will go to this port and RedMon will capture the output, and then call a program and pass it this PS output in a file. Now we're cooking! But which program should we call?
GHOSTBUSTERS er.. Free PDF We have to call Ghostscript eventually to do the conversion to PDF but if we use RedMon to call Ghostscript, it is real messy with lots of weird Ghostscript parameters.
In fact, here is a screen shot (which you can get by clicking the
Also RedMon passes a stream of data to the STDIN "pipe" which the called program needs to be expecting. If you want you can skip using Free PDF and call GhostView directly from the RedMon Program. It is messy. You have to get the trailing " -" (hyphen space) just right or you can kill your print Spooler. For the adventurous, click here (Coming soon) to see how to do this. Instead, we can do it the easy way and use RedMon's sibling program RedRun. Unlike RedMon (which passes a stream of data to the called program), RedRun writes to a temporary file and passes the name of the file to the called program. RedRun comes with RedMon. It's in the RedMon Directory. Red Rover, Red Rover, Come on Over...Opps digressing... Get Back on Track RedRun will:
This is great! Don't you just hate having those temporary files accumulating in the C:\Windows\Temp directory chewing up the space on your hard drive? What we need is another program for RedRun to Call which will simplify the call to Ghostscript and make it easier to setup this process and smoother when executing. Also with such a program we can do other things like provide a "Save as.." dialog box to place and name the output PDF rather than having the name fixed. Enter Free PDF. This is why Free PDF was written. We will have RedRun call Free PDF and pass it the name of the temp file and Free PDF will make the complex call to Ghostscript for us.
Free PDF
RedRun calls Free PDF which is simple right now and growing more complex as more features are added. Free PDF:
SECOND TRY
So now the steps for our scenario to create a PDF from an application is to print and:
and Poof! Free PDF pops up.
Now we're cooking!
Perhaps we should rename the
Like This
Architecture
So Pictorally, the architecture of the whole Process looks like:
Now that you understand conceptually how it works, We're ready to move on to the details. Click on Configuration page to see how to do this
PDF (Portable Document Format) is
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button) from Free
PDF which shows us what the command would look like.
