Re: Held hostage by Adobe for $39.00

[Mike Stockman <mstockman -at- mac -dot- com>]

On 06/16/2003 3:57 PM, Peter (pnewman1 -at- optonline -dot- net) wrote:

>Hopefully, if enough of us make enough noise, that obnoxious practice 
>will stop. Unfortunately, right now Adobe has few competitors for 
>distiller and they feel they can get away with that nonsense. I am 
>somewhat surprised though, that there have been so few complaints. Maybe 
>Bruce will chime in here about a Linux app.

Well, I'm not as knowledgable about these things as Bruce, but 
Ghostscript will do all of the PDF-creating things you need except for 
applying Acrobat's "security" settings to the results. You can take a 
PostScript file and distill a PDF from it pretty easily. For those who 
are command-line phobic, you can also get GSView which can open the 
PostScript file and save it as a PDF (among other formats) by using 
GhostScript on the back end.

Ghostscript doesn't integrate into applications as smoothly as Acrobat 
does (you won't find a Ghostscript button in Word, and FrameMaker can't 
call GhostScript directly to save as PDF), but you can still distill the 
output from those apps (with hot links, as long as the app writes them to 
the Postscript file).

To see more, visit <http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/>.

Hope this helps,
Mike




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