[UFO Chicago] The Two-Stage Solution

[Jay F. Shachter]

The problem, you will recall, is that the recent versions of
ghostscript no longer convert from PostScript or PDF to GIF.
Ghostscript use to do it, but recent versions are unwilling to.

The "convert" program, from the Imagemagick suite, is willing to
convert from PostScript to GIF, but it doesn't know how to.
That is to say, it tries, but it does a really bad job.

A two-stage solution has been proposed: use ghostscript to convert
from PostScript or PDF to some other image format, like, e.g.,
pnm:

 gs -r600 -dNOPAUSE -q -sDEVICE=png16m -dBATCH -dAutoRotatePages=/None -sOutputFile=file.png file.ps

and then use ImageMagick to convert from that other image format to gif:

 convert file.png file.gif

and then don't forget to remove the intermediary file:

 rm file.png

This works.  I have, until now, been employing a different solution,
which is faster, but it required a large initial investment of time.
 From the source code of the last version of gs that supported GIF
conversion (I think that was version 5, or thereabouts), I took the
GIF conversion functions, and I added them to the source code of the
subsequent versions of gs, and then rebuilt gs.  This gave me a
version of gs with all the functionality of the current version, plus
it did GIF conversion.  This worked until version 9.  Version 9
changed the interface to the conversion functions, and I was unwilling
to spend the time necessary to rewrite the GIF conversion functions to
support the new interface.  So I now have GhostScript version 9, which
I use for all things except for generating GIF output, and I have, in
a different directory, GhostScript version 8, which I now use solely
for generating GIF output.  I use, not the two-stage solution, but the
two-ghostscripts solutions.

Both of these solutions, though, are bogus.  Why was the GIF
conversion functionality taken out of GhostScript version 5?  Because
someone found out that it was patented?  Even if that was true, surely
the patent has expired by now.  Patents are short-lived.  GhostScript
should support GIF conversion.  My original question remains: Why
doesn't it?

	Jay F. Shachter
	6424 North Whipple Street
	Chicago IL  60645-4111
		(1-773)7613784   landline
		(1-410)9964737   GoogleVoice
                http://m5.chicago.il.us
		jay at m5.chicago.il.us

	"But when she traced the killer's IP address ... it was in the 192.168/16 block!"