[gs-devel] ghostscript output devices

[Ralph Giles]

On Wednesday, April 2, 2003, at 02:35 pm, Andreas Volz wrote:

> I looked at the availavle devices (gs -h) , but I've seen no device 
> that
> fits my requirements. Are there patches or newer versions of 
> ghostscript
> which support one of these devices?

Not that I'm aware of.

> If not, what could I do it? Is it a good solution to get images from gs
> and display them on the desired device? Other ideas...?

Yes, that's reasonable. There are actually quite a few ways to go about 
it. The simplest is just to use one of the existing image file devices 
to rasterize a file in a separate process and either cache the file on 
disk or pipe it to a display application. If you use one of the p*mraw 
devices, this can be reasonably fast. Please see Use.htm in the 
documentation for information on the gs commandline to use.

You can also your own output device supporting any of the above display 
APIs. See Devices.htm and gdev*.c in the source for examples. I 
wouldn't suggest this unless you need 'gs' to function generically with 
these devices for others. The device api is somewhat complicated, and 
we're trying to reduce the number of output devices in general.

The best option if you need speed or integration is to build 
ghostscript as a library and use the gsapi_* interface to rasterize 
files. This is intended for viewer application clients, and avoids the 
overhead of pipes or interprocess communication.

Finally, you could write a ijs (www.linuxprinting.org/ijs/) driver. 
This interface is intended mostly to simplify separate packaging of 
printer drivers, so it would mostly be a because-you-can option. :)

Hope those pointers are some help,
  -r