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...
Nov 30, 2008
So AROS couldn't read PDF, right?
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...