Ghostscript / GSview   When I started to work on this web site's section with Scottish walks I needed a program to generate PDF files, the most commonly used platform independent document format. Some searching on the web brought me to the home page for Ghostscript and its graphical interface GSview. Ghostscript is an interpreter for the Postscript language and for PDF (Portable Document Format). The program does not have a graphical user interface of its own, which is where GSview comes into play. The combination of these two programs makes an easy to use tool to view both Postscript and PDF documents and to convert between the two formats. Quite handy, because on most platforms it is easy to create a Postscript file: just print to a file, using a driver for any type of Postscript printer (under Windows I use the HP Color Laserjet 5/5M PS 9X driver with good results). Ghostscript does not support all features of the PDF standard (links and bookmarks are not or poorly supported), but for most documents it does a good enough job. I find that in some cases Ghostscript does an even better job printing PDF documents than Adobe's Acrobat reader. And the best thing is of course: both Ghostscript and GSview are available as freeware. Ghostscript is available for Windows, OS/2, Linux, Unix, VMS; and GSview for Windows, OS/2 and Linux (there exists another graphical interface program for Unix and VMS).

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