Tag: ghostscript

Big old scanned manuals to small old scanned manuals

It is good that there are so many scanned manuals for old computer systems out there. Every old system did things its very own special way, and life’s too short to guess. I mean, there’s not much out there on the SYM-1 I’m trying to get working again:

— not much except for 6502.org’s excellent Synertek SYM-1 Resources, that is.

Some manuals, though, while lovingly scanned, are just too large to download, browse or file. Take, for instance, AppleIIScans’ Apple II BASIC Programming With ProDOS. It’s a very faithful colour scan, but at 170 MB for 280 pages, it’s a bit unwieldy. I suspect it’s Adobe Acrobat Paper Capture’s fault: while it makes turning scans into readable files really easy, it doesn’t warn against using 600 dpi full colour for a book with only decorative use of colour.

Good old Ghostscript saves the day, though:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sColorConversionStrategy=Gray -dProcessColorModel=/DeviceGray -dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -q -sOutputFile=1983-A2L2013-m-a2-bpwp-grey.pdf -- 1983-A2L2013-m-a2-bpwp.pdf

By downsampling the scanned images and converting everything to greyscale, the result’s only 16 MB. All text and indexing from Acrobat is left intact.

GSView … not to be confused with GSview

Artifex’s GSView is rather good. It describes itself as ‘a user friendly viewer for Postscript, PDF, XPS, EPUB, CBZ, JPEG, and PNG’, and it sure does those things. It’s currently bundled as Mac, Windows and Linux Intel-only binaries, but maybe we’ll see ARM distribution or source soon enough.

The name confused me a bit. Russell Lang of Ghostgum Software Pty Ltd has maintained a nice Windows-only Ghostscript front end called GSview for years. Note the huge difference in names: Artifex‘s release is GSView 6, while Ghostgum’s is GSview 5. Hmm.

GSView on Linux

Naming aside, GSView does make it very easy to convert its input files to PDF/A, the ISO standard archival PDF definition that is immune to Adobe’s format meddling. (Adobe have, with Acrobat Reader DC, maintained an unbroken tradition that their latest PDF reader software is more bloated and craptastic than the last.)

PDF/A defines several archival settings such as font embedding and colour management. It’s possible to do this on the Ghostscript command line, but it’s fiddly.  GSView just needs you to point it at the colour standard files on your system. On Mac, these live in /System/Library/ColorSync/Profiles/, and in the image below, I’ve picked out the generic ones:

GSView Mac Colour Profiles

On Linux, these files will likely be somewhere predictable; for me, they are in /usr/share/ghostscript/9.15/iccprofiles/. I made copies in the GSView executable folder so they wouldn’t get lost if my system updates Ghostscript:

GSView Linux Colour Profiles

The PDF/A files you get can be considerably smaller than the originals. A 10 MB LibreOffice Impress slide deck from a presentation on OpenStreetMap that I gave last week shrunk down to 1.3 MB when saved by GSView, with only very minor JPEG gribblies visible in the slide background. The graphic above (modified from the Ghostscript example file ‘golfer.eps’; yay, Illustrator 1.0!) shrunk by ⅓. These are handy savings, plus you get a standalone archival format that will never change!

pretty-printing Arduino sketches

I don’t often need it, but the code printing facility in the Arduino IDE is very weak. It has some colour highlighting, but no page numbering, no line numbering, and no headers at all.

a2ps will sort you right out here. Years back, it was a simple text to PostScript filter, but now it has many wonderful filters for pretty-printing code. The Wiring/Arduino language is basically C++, and a2ps knows how to deal with that. So, to create a PostScript file with a nice version of the the most basic Blink sketch:

a2ps --pro=color -C -1 -M letter -g --pretty-print='c++' -o ~/Desktop/Blink.ps Blink.ino

If you’re somewhere that uses sensible paper sizes (in other words, not North America), you probably don’t want the -M letter option. a2ps is supposed to have a PDF print option (-P pdf), but it doesn’t work on my installation, so I just splat the output through ps2pdf. You can’t use the -P «printer» option combined with the -o «file» option, but cups-pdf is your friend if you need to print to a PDF. The results are linked below:

Not bad, eh?

(Update: think I must have written this post on a Mac with a case-insensitive filesystem. Using the --pretty-print='C++' option I had before failed on Linux.)

Lady Goosepelt Rides Again!

Lady Goosepelt, from What a Life!

In case anyone wants them, the 600 dpi page images of What a Life! are stored in this PDF: what_a_life.pdf (16MB). If you merely wish to browse, all the images from the book are here.

I got a bit carried away with doing this. Instead of just smacking together all the 360 dpi TIFFs I scanned seven years ago, I had to scan a new set at a higher resolution, then crop them, then fix the page numbers, add chapter marks, and make the table of contents a set of live links.

I’ve got out of the way of thinking in PostScript, so I spent some time looking for tools that would do things graphically. Bah! These things’d cost a fortune, so armed only with netpbm, libtiff, ghostscript, the pdfmark reference, Aquamacs, awk to add content based on the DSC, and gimp to work out the link zones on the contents page, I made it all go. Even I’m impressed.

One thing that didn’t impress me, though:

aquamacs file size warning

I used to edit multi-gigabyte files with emacs on Suns. They never used to complain like this. They just loaded (admittedly fairly slowly) and let me do my thing. Real emacs don’t give warning messages.