PM PDF (Poor Mans PDF)

PM PDF (Poor Mans PDF) or Presentation Manager PDF (whatever !) 27-02-2003 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, no need to install GhostScript everywhere. Requirements: PDFWRITE.PDR (no instalation Support !!!) - PSCRIPT.DRV, from IBM Device Driver site - GhostScript v8.x (tested with 7.x as well) (can be found on Hobbes) - EMX 0.9d (for GhostScript) PMPDFCP.EXE - PDFWRITE.PDR installed and working Installation I stil don't have a suitable installer for the Port Driver, so it should be done manualy. Although its not for the faint hearted it should be doable for everyone. - Create a new printer object as described in the warp manual. - Install a driver for the 'Postscript - Apple Laser Writer 12/600' - in the Port Selection pane, select a port and from the popup menu select 'install' - in the dialog type in the path where you downloaded the port driver, and hit the 'refresh' button - select the pmpdf portdriver and hit the 'install' buton - redo the above step (this is a OS/2 limitation) - you should now see the portdriver immediatly in the dialog - again hit 'install' button. - the pdf portdriver should now be visible in the port driver pane. - double click the pfd port driver and modify the settings to your needs - hit install to finish the printer installation 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. PMPDFCP.EXE installation - download the PMPDFCP.EXE to a place where you want to store it - in the system settings folder create a object for the executable - name it PMPDF Control Panel 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! v1.0.5 - Various bug fixes v1.0.0 Changes: - Final Release v0.2.3 Changes: - Just bugfixing, and memory leak resolving v0.2.2 Changes: - New Dialogs, thanks to XWP Helpers they look good now. - PMPDFCP.EXE change settings from system setup instead of 3rd page of printer. v0.2.1 Changes - Auto generating of filenames - Auto generating of PDF when filenames are generated - support for PDFMark wordprocessor extensions. - various bug-fixes 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 pmpdf@egroups.com ftp://ftp.netlabs.org/pub/tools/pmpdf