Well, that's not completely true. AROS used to read PDF files thanks to an old port of Ghostscript made by Whoosh777, and a working reader was included in old AROS distribution AROS-MAX. Thanks to Simone Bernacchia, who decided to contact him, Whoosh has recently made a quick port of version GPL Ghostscript 8.60. Unluckily I had problems with it, so I decided to give a try also to the older version, even if I was told that something had broken it in the meanwhile. I placed the right assigns in user-startup... et voilà , PDF documents are accessible again. GS is not properly a viewer, but more likely a converter/printer, so I had to find a way to make PDF viewing more user-friendly. I ended up making another little script (I love scripting, and the way AROS allow to do this) called PoorPDF that does the trick: it converts PDF files into JPEG images, places them in RAM and then calls PicShow to show them. Now moving from a page to another is far easier and quicker. Yes, it's not like having Acrobat Reader converted to VmwAROS, but I really doubt that Adobe will ever decide to port it to AROS anyway...
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Nov 30, 2008
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So AROS couldn't read PDF, right?
So AROS couldn't read PDF, right?
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Author Details
Paolo Besser is a long time Commodore fan and Amiga user. He joined the AROS project some time around year 2001 and started its main distribution in 2007. He's a IT technician, journalist and a VMware system administrator.