Date: Mon, 21 Mar 94 14:07:59 JST
From: Stephen Turnbull <turnbull AT shako DOT sk DOT tsukuba DOT ac DOT jp>
To: aferrign AT iisst3 DOT italy DOT NCR DOT COM
Cc: djgpp AT sun DOT soe DOT clarkson DOT edu
Subject: Ghostscript under djgpp

I'm posting this because I think the availability of the Ghostscript
port to DJGPP is of some general interest.  However, please send
followups or questions to me, not to the list.  (If they're general
Ghostscript questions, maybe they should go to ghost AT aladdin DOT com,
instead; I'm not a Postscript hacker.) 
    I'm currently a beta tester for Ghostscript in the DESQview/X + DJGPP
environment.  I don't use other features of Ghostscript except for the
X11 screen driver and the HP LJ driver very much.  But my impressions
are as follows: 
(1) It's been a long time since I tried it on my laptop with 4MB
(320x200 16-level grayscale is not very impressive), and my current
environment is DESQview with a 16MB RAM machine.  (However, I have run
it in a window limited to 2MB of VCPI memory successfully.)  But I
heave never had memory problems with it, for what that's worth.
(2) There is a DJGPP-compiled version 2.6.1 Ghostcript available on
most Simtel mirrors.  It expects the X11 device to be available, but
I've used it successfully in other environments without change.  It is
somewhat inconvenient, as the guy who biult it built in some
banana-flavored defaults (the executable expects to find the libraries
on drive D:) but these can be worked around or you can rebuild easily
from MAKE.BAT included with the DJGPP distribution.  I'm not going to
go into details, as they're pretty straightforward, but if you have
questions, mail me (don't post to the list) and I'll give what help I
can.
    There is no proper makefile for that version, and the makefiles
for the more recent betas are all broken (Aladdin doesn't use DJGPP,
it's a user (= me and Tom Brosnan, who did the 2.6.1 port---Thanks
again, Tom) supported port).  I haven't tried a build with Make 3.70,
yet.
    The main difference between the Unix-GCC makefile and the DJGPP
makefile is that DJGPP requires certain parts of the DOS file system
interface, the parts dealing with "special files" like the printer.
This is taken care of in Tom's MAKE.BAT.
(3) I have had the following problems with *all* versions of
Ghostscript since 2.5.1:
(a) The sample file ESCHER.PS leaves Ghostscript in a wrong state, and
Ghostscript bombs on the next file.  I haven't checked, but it is
believed this is a problem with heavy use of recursion in ESCHER.PS
(are you surprised :), as it has been reported on Suns also.
(b) The test file BALI4.PS causes a memory fault.  This is believed to
be a general Ghostscript bug in the color support (it's a color file).
This is a level 2 feature, and wasn't supported in 2.5.x, and maybe
not in 2.6.x (I forget).
    As I said, these are believed to be general problems, not
specific to the DJGPP version.  But I thought I'd mention them.
    The bottom line is that in my environment Ghostscript has been a
robust tool.