PulkoMandy's homepage

Today I released version 1.0 of BGhostView, a postscript document viewer for Haiku.

This software started in the late 90s as a port of a postscript viewer from UNIX/Linux to BeOS. Back then, Ghostscript did not have a cross platform API, and the BeOS port had to work with a patched up version of the Windows GSDLL API, heavily modified to run on BeOS.

I started working on it because in my past attempt to port Haiku to SPARC machines, I found that a lot of the documentation for these was distributed as PS files instead of the now more typical PDF. At the time, no version of ghostscript was available for Haiku. So I started digging and found an old port of Ghostscript whic provided a starting point, and this viewer I could use it with. But it wasn't working very well.

I then found that Ghostscript now has a slighly better API, and I could make use of that instead. So now BGhostView is running with an up to date version of Ghostscript (thanks to other people who also have postscript interpretation needs on Haiku, this was not taken care entirely by me).

I had not touched BGhostview since 2019, but I got reports that it was crashing recently. So, this week I dug into the code again and made some fixes and updates and decided to make a 1.0.0 version for all to enjoy. It is certainly not yet perfect, but for the basic needs of viewing Postscript documents, it should be fine.

This is yet another one of these applications that is currently hosted by HaikuArchives on Github, meaning it is more or less open for many people to contribute to, but left without someone to really take care of it and move it forward. Well, I guess that can be me when there are bugs to fix, but I probably won't have time to manage the larger refactorings and cleanups that would be needed: converting the UI to Haiku layout system so that it can automatically scale for High DPI displays, reindenting and reformatting all the sourcecode (it's very inconsistent at the moment, I guess most of it was written without a proper code editor that would watch the indentation a bit?), and reviewing the Ghostscript integration code to make better use of the APIs available in modern versions. Postscript isn't exactly great for that kind of usage, just figuring out how many pages there are in a document turns out to be a somewhat tricky problem.

There's also the question of wether we want a separate viewer for each document format. Wouldn't it be nice if the same viewer could do both PDF and PostScript? And what about DVI and XPS and FOP? And maybe docx and opendocument while we're at it? Could we use translators for this, so we can write the GUI once and then have all formats added to it later on? That would certainly be a cool project, but I already have many other things on my TODO list, so, not for now...

Get the sourcecode here

If you just want to run BGhostView on Haiku you can simply install it from HaikuDepot as you'd usually do.

Name: Mail: