PS Viewer 1.0.0 Release Notes

Release Notes Version: : 1.6 $.

The most recent version of this file is available here.
Release notes for all versions of the PS Viewer are available here.

The PS Viewer is a Level 2 PostScript viewer which can either be used stand-alone or is embeddable in a user application.

The Viewer will handle most PostScript commands, but some restrictions apply, see our bug database.

Contents

• PostScript Compliance
• Major changes in the PS Viewer 1.0.0
• Documentation
• License
• Installing the PS Viewer
• Compiling the PS Viewer
• Building an Application with the PS Viewer
• Running the PS Viewer
• Features/Limitations of the Current Release
• Reporting Bugs
• Examples

PostScript Compliance

This viewer implements most of the PostScript Level 2 commands and some of the Level 3 commands. For a description of PostScript see the PostScript Language Reference Manual, Third Edition from Adobe Systems Inc.

Major changes in the PS Viewer 1.0.0

• FREEHEP-375: Examples added for PStoSWF converter and EmbeddedPSViewer.
• FREEHEP-359: PSPanel no longer dependent on BackedBuffer but on BufferedPanel.
• FREEHEP-372: Setup of PS Viewer is now easier.
• FREEHEP-373: Package PS Viewer and its source and tests files separately from FreeHEP.
• FREEHEP-358: Runs in JDK 1.4 again after fixing ExceptionInInitializerError.

Documentation

The following documentation is currently available:

• PostScript Language Reference Manual, Third Edition (Red Book)
• PostScript Language Tutorial and Cookbook (Blue Book)
• PostScript Language Program Design (Green Book)
• Thinking in PostScript
• PSViewer API documentation

License

The PS Viewer is part of the FreeHEP Java Library, an "Open Source" library distributed under the terms of the LGPL. If you have questions about the licensing please send a mail to: developers@freehep.org.

Installing the PS Viewer

Download the PS Viewer and unpack. The distribution creates the following directory structure:

PSViewer-version            containing license and release notes
PSViewer-version/bin        containing run scripts
PSViewer-version/examples   containing examples
PSViewer-version/lib        containing jar files

Compiling the PS Viewer

The current distribution does not contain source files.

To (re-)build the PS Viewer you need to get PSViewer-1.0.0-src.zip or .tar.gz file from the ftp://ftp.slac.stanford.edu/software/freehep/PSViewer/v1.0.0/ directory.

To compile it, follow the general instructions for Building the Java FreeHEP Library and compile only the psviewer.jar file using the command:

ant -Djar=psviewer

To build the distribution kit:

cd org/freehep/postscript
gmake dist

Building an Application with the PS Viewer

Set the environment variable PSVIEWER_HOME to your unpacked PSViewer distribution.

Add the following libraries (all in /lib) to your CLASSPATH:

freehep-psviewer.jar
freehep-graphicsio.jar
freehep-graphics2d.jar
freehep-base.jar

Now you can compile your application using the PS Viewer, and run it.

Running the PS Viewer

Set the environment variable PSVIEWER_HOME to your unpacked PSViewer distribution.

Add /bin to your PATH and run:

psviewer

Features/Limitations of the Current Release

The following limitations exist:

• All outstanding issues in the Bug Database.
• All images using 12 bits/component probably will not work.
• The distribution kits contain some CVS directories and files, please ignore.
• The freehep-base.jar file (and especially its sources) are dependent on some external jar files which are not strictly needed for the PS Viewer. Please ignore for now. In a later release we will shrink freehep-base.jar and get rid of these dependencies.

Reporting Bugs

To report bugs or request enhancements you may use the FreeHEP bug database, component PS Viewer.

Examples

The PSViewer/examples directory contains:

• EmbedPSViewer.java which shows how to embed 2 PSViewers in one application
• PStoSWF.java which shows how to build a converter from PostScript to Macromedia Flash Format (SWF).