In article <PMR.95Jan27152023 at unst.sanger.ac.uk>, Peter Rice
<pmr at unst.sanger.ac.uk> wrote: >
>Correct me if I have the wrong
impression, but would it help you >to have the GCG manual available on
your PC or Mac (including graphics >examples) ? >
Sorry this isn't part of the original thread, but I screwed up using
vi and had to start from scratch.
For a some of you, the GCG docs can be accessed at your Mac
(possibly PC w/ Windows) via the following kludge: I took the GCG docs
provided by our computer support group in postscript format and
converted them to PDF files using Adobe Distiller. PDF stands for
portable document format, a scheme devised by Adobe to enable receivers
of PDFs to view documents with proper formatting even if they lack the
fonts used by the creating application. Thus, all the fonts and
graphics are retained in the PDF version. Then, you can used Adobe's
freely distributed Acrobat Reader software to view the PDF. The Reader
has some nice features, such as Find, Bookmarking, zoom in/out, and
Linking various parts of a file. This allows you to select some text
range and link it to any other part of a file. Click on the first
link, and you immediately scroll to the next link. Arrow buttons allow
you to navigate back and forth through the links. Set bookmarks at the
parts of the file you refer to most for quick access. Although the
commands are there, I wasn't able to print highlighted sections,
instead I got postscript error reports. I'm sure there is a way to get
printing to work.
Drawbacks:
1) PDFs are BIG files, about as big as the postscript file
they were based on. PS files for all the GCG chapters amount to about
20MB.
2) At this point, the manual is not one file, so you would have
to open a separate PDF for each topic. One large PDF would certainly
NOT be a tenable solution given it's size. A means of linking separate
PDFs would be better. I don't know if this capability exists.
Sure, I realize this is not a great solution. But if you've got the
memory and like to play around with software, give it a go.
Certainly the best solution would be an HTML version accessible via
your favorite WWW browser. Do you think we could convince GCG to do
that!?
How can you get Adobe's Acrobat Distiller (PS->PDF)? Purchase the
deluxe CD-ROM version of Adobe Illustrator 5.5, and it comes with it.
We were able to get that for about $150 at edu. discount.
Another good reason to have Distiller and Illustrator: you can convert
any GCG graphics output from ps to PDF, and then import the PDF into
Illustrator (put -plot=filename on GCG cmd line). That means the text blocks
and line art remains as such,
selectable and editable objects. Unfortunately I haven't found a way to
convert this to PICT format. I wanted to do my editing in Canvas rather
than Illustrator. If you copy and paste, you get an EPSF in the canvas
window. It will probably print correctly, but you can't edit it.
