writing pdfs

[Greg 'groggy' Lehey]

On Friday, 10 October 2003 at  8:31:41 -0400, William O'Higgins wrote:
> I have grown tired of using MS Word as my standard document output
> format.  I haven't gotten OpenOffice to work under FreeBSD (and it isn't
> my favourite tool by a long shot) and I am most happy generating text in
> vi.  PDF is eminently portable, and I think that it would suit my
> purposes nicely.
>
> I had some thoughts about generating PDFs, but I was hoping for advice
> about which tools to use.  Should I just learn how to mark up a text
> page manually (I write HTML almost as quickly as plain text)?  Should I
> learn TeX or some variant and translate it?  I hear that PHP has some
> excellent PDF-generation tools; should I write up a command-line
> interpreter myself?  Any suggestions would be appreciated.
>
> I did a bit of searching, but I didn't find any real *advice* on what
> process to use, and most of the tools that I found are for viewing PDFs,
> not writing them.

PDF is a relatively unimportant part of the story.  Most programs can
generate PostScript, and ghostscript can convert PostScript to PDF.
It comes with a script ps2pdf which does just that, though there are
some options you can tweak.  I use the following Makefile rule:

.ps.pdf:
	$(GS) -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sPAPERSIZE=$(PAPER) -sOutputFile=$@ -c save pop -f $<

PAPER is one of the identifiers defined in
/usr/local/share/ghostscript/*version*/lib/gs_statd.ps.

The real question was: which markup?  Doubtless DocBook is the most
recommendable, and it's very close in concept to HTML.  I have lots of
difficulty with it, though, and processing it is currently still a
pain.  You might like to look at the (barely documented) gmat port,
which is what O'Reilly use to format their books.

Apart from that, there's (La)TeX and groff.  I started off with TeX
and moved on to groff.  Every time I go back to TeX, it drives me
mad.  groff is relatively easy to use, but most people consider it
obsolescent.

Greg
--
When replying to this message, please copy the original recipients.
If you don't, I may ignore the reply or reply to the original recipients.
For more information, see http://www.lemis.com/questions.html
See complete headers for address and phone numbers.
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 187 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-questions/attachments/20031011/ff60358b/attachment.bin