Sign Georgia Work Order Easy

Document type sign work order georgia easy

[Music] hi this is Doug from dynamic computing and welcome to episode 59 of 10-minute amiga retro cast now a few weeks back I covered telecommuting on your amiga and I covered things like email word processing spreadsheets dealing with graphics files dealing with Dropbox but one part I could not get to in the interest of time was handling PDF files now PDF files as you probably know mean Portable Document format they're a format created by Adobe designed to be able to interchange relatively non editable files amongst different platforms you need to send somebody a a form to fill out by hand created as a PDF and email it to them now readers have been available for Windows Macs and Linux machines for decades now so does that mean our poor little Amiga is left out in the cold unable to open these PDF files name a they work okay your Amiga can open these files and deal with them and even convert them into other formats if need be today we'll look at four different ways to handle your PDF files and we'll see which ones are best they all have their strengths they all have their weaknesses let's take a look now the Adobe PDF format has changed over the decades currently it's up to version 1.7 of the actual file format now venerable software that you might have heard of in the past like a PDF that can really only handle version 1.2 or 1.3 PDF files before choking so that causes an issue for some of the files but other programs were you're going to be showing you today can handle the newer formats without a big issue one of the things we're going to be using today to handle PDF files is an engine called ghost script now go script is available on just about any platform you can find it's currently up to version nine point three point two and it's just a way for computers to handle PDF files and to be able to manipulate them and do things with them under the GNU Public License now our amiga version is only up to version eight point seven which is still pretty darn good it was last updated by the author whose name is whoosh in 2010 it seems to handle most PDF files pretty well now ghost script is really a command-line utility which is fine perfectly fine but that's not how we want to deal with it this is an amiga this is a graphics operating system we want to put a GUI front end down there graphic user interface we're gonna look at two different front ends available one of them is easy GS from our pals over to media kit now this one hasn't been updated in about ten years but I'll tell you a little bit more about that in a little bit the second one is GS GUI and it's version 0.38 and let's see this is made by Michael Merkel and Matthias Karn I do hope I didn't butcher those names too bad guys sorry now to be honest you're going to need an AGA machine to do anything with go script there just is no ECS File Viewer now I suspect that some of the conversion utilities that are built in to go script probably do work on e CS so you may be able to import a file a PDF file and convert it into a tiff file or a JPEG or something like that I'm going to experiment over that and see if it works now an e CS machine either with a vampire in it and make a 500 or 600 that's vampire eyes that's got great retarget able graphics or like an Amiga 2000 or an Amiga 3000 with an RTG a retargeting or graphics card works absolutely perfect with go script it's just ECS it doesn't work with so let's jump into the ghost script install the website to download the latest version is whoosh seven seven seven dot-com and it is interesting and colorful I have nothing but respect for whoosh and for the hard work you put into the project but this website again so like let's scroll down here into some of the install sections here we go err there we go how to install it now tell me can you read any of that on that background it is almost unreadable going through here because of the backgrounds that he uses something I know he's going whoosh the whole jet plane thing but you know luckily he does have a text-only version of the website that is substantially more readable where he can turn off those atrocious background images as you can see as we go through here it still doesn't make a whole lot of sense it's it's very well let's say it's all over the places what it is the install installation routines jump back and forth information this just seems to be in random order on here now I do find this quite often where people who do a lot of coding think very different than mere mortals and have a hard time clearly communicating things so what appears as logical and informational in set of instructions to them is nothing but a hodgepodge of nearly useless information to 85 percent of the population so let me explain it in English now let's go to download our files here we are in eyebrows and let's take a peek we're going to jump to the download sections we go to installations downloads now you're gonna see there's a couple of files GS 870 core LH a download that GS 5 LH a GS 870 IX e mu L dot a LH a and icon scripts that LH those are the ones you want this one that's that says no I XE mu L that's really for more fo s we don't need that one so just those four go ahead and download those either on your amiga or on your pc and bring them over to the amiga now let's make things easy and we're gonna create a folder right on the amiga called PDF we're gonna put that in our work drive here PDF now we're going to take our lovely little LH a files that we've just downloaded and we're gonna copy them to that folder so in this situation I downloaded them to my ten mark and my ten mark ap 59 CD downloads I've got all of the files right here in my downloads folder now I've downloaded everything we're going to talk about I'm just gonna copy it all over to my new folder I created so copy dot OHA and of course this is just saying grab all the LH a files in this one folder and we're going to copy them to work : PDF and it copies all the files right over now that that's done let's go to our PDF folder that we've created we're going to do this from the command line it is absolutely possible to do this from workbench with a utility like a unarchive er that comes with gulliver or with gulliver's best workbench program but let's go ahead and just do it from the command line we're going to go to work and we're gonna go to PDF now it's good directory we see our important files that we've downloaded here GS 870 core and all the other ones we're gonna decompress them right here in this folder so the command line is LH a and E for extract GS 870 laj and because i didn't give it a path to decompress - it's going to do it in the folder that I'm currently in which is exactly what I want now let's do this for our other files so we're going to look at the names again just look at the LH a files we're gonna decompress LH a GS 870 I ex e mu l dot LH a that I forgot to put the e in there I do that all the time next file is going to be GS fonts now hae GS fonts LH a those are all of our Adobe Acrobat fonts and and similar ones that are going to be used for the program and lastly a little simple one l hae icon scripts LH a perfect now we've downloaded and we've decompressed all of the ghost script files in one folder called PDF so if we look in this folder now we're going to see there's I created a doc folder and examples a live man resource bin fonts icon scripts it's created all the directories that I need to have created for go script work now the next thing we need to do is make some manual assigns in our user startup folder now I'm a big fan of the program reddit that comes again with gulliver's best workbench program so let's go ahead and get read it open you can use any text editing utility you want to edit your user startup file you can even use the built-in one called edie that i went over a couple of months ago in one of my tutorials what you want to do is you want to browse the S folder of your workbench disk that's where all your batch files hide we're gonna go into user startup click OK here now you'll see I've already got these created but we're going to modify them what you want to do is create a section and user startup though semicolon begin go script this is just giving us a little bit of information about what's coming next we're going to assign GS 870 now I've moved to this and you're going to tell it what folder to assign it to and that's whatever folder you've decompressed your files to so assign GS 870 to work : PDF assign GS to the GS 870 folder it basically you're just saying the word GS : and the word GS 870 : mean exactly the same thing assign it go script which is the full word go script to that same directory assign GS fonts : GS 870 : fonts that's where all of our fonts are and lastly assign GS cache to the T : folder which is usually in your ram drive that's it for the assigns now we do end go script here with a little semicolon in front of it just to tell us that we thought we've ended that now we're going to save this and reboot the machine so your changes take effect now that we've rebooted we're all set to go and go script is installed and ready to go so what was a 400 page long website we've now narrowed down to about three or four minutes of installation should it be going just fine now now as I mentioned we're not going to be using the command line when we use go script although you absolutely can and there are instructions online for doing that if you do use the command line go script you need to launch a shell and you need to do this stack 200 thousand and what that does is that creates a little buffer for this particular shell that's open that go script is going to need now with the utilities we're going to be using in a few minutes those take care of the stack for us this is only if you are manually doing everything with the command-line now on to our GUI interfaces forgo script I'm going to highlight two of them today easy GS from Amiga kit and the aforementioned GS GUI now we're going to start with easy GS and I'm going to put the link for that right here at the bottom of your screen because that is a direct download from Amiga kit once we download it and I've already downloaded the file and I've put it into our work : PDF folder let's take a look Derrell H a there it is easy GL h a we're going to decompress that LH a e-easy GS o h a and look at that it comes with just a couple of little files let's take a look at what it comes with here we're gonna go to our work folder we're gonna go to our PDF folder and looky looky we've got we're gonna snapshot that we've got easy GS right here it doesn't get any easier than this now before we launch the software we need to tell ez GS we're ghost script is located we're going to do that by single clicking ez GS going to the icons menu going to information and you see GS path equals cysts utilities go script GS nope that's not where we put it is it this is actually GS 870 : Ben still Ashe GS what this is saying is okay where is my GS file my go script file it is under my work which we've gotten assigned for let's show all files it is in my bin folder which is here and inside of theirs of a little file called GS which is the go script file that's where I'm telling it to point to right here now I'm also going to make a bigger stack I've got the memory for it so I'm going to use half a megabyte for the stack size now this one file path equals PDF what that means is that they've got a PDF a sign that it's assuming that you have that you save your PDF files them now we've created a no PDF assign but I happen to have an assign called Docs so I'm just gonna change that now when I go to open a PDF file it's automatically gonna look in my Doc's assign we're gonna save this and we're gonna go in and we're gonna launch the program easy GS look how simple that is let's get rid of a few of these make it so we can see that simple little thing copyright 2009 Amiga kit calm now I have been chatting with Matthew from Amiga kid over the past week and he is willing and interested in updating the software and making it more powerful and useful so I'd love to hear from Europe I'd love to hear your ideas in the comments below and I'll pass them on to Matthew about what he can do to improve it and just be aware he's working with the limitations of go script so requests to make the PDF open and half a second just won't work let's go ahead and take a look and see what it can do we have a standard file requester here I put my PDF sample files in my episode 59 directory files let's look at this computer magazine cover this is a cover of computes Gazette that was in PDF format now we click on view now I sped this up dramatically that was about a 50 second load and that is on a Amiga 4000 with 68 Oh 60 running at 80 megahertz a fast Guzzi drive and 128 megabytes of RAM this is not going to break any speed records but it's absolutely usable you see when it first opens it comes with this little help window that gives you some hints about what you can use on here so type 0 to resize that to fit the window and you can blur and sharpen things although I can get that to work very well we're gonna go ahead and do it it says and press return to leave there and we're going to look at our file look at that nice little PDF file converted and viewable right on your amiga and you're able to take a look at it we can press 0 and it should resize it to fit the page yep there it is you can also hit the spacebar and it comes up with this hint menu this help menu that gives you some some options of what you can do I hear some useful ones 1/2 the zoom double the zoom H and D let's try that we're gonna hit H now it's tiny d brings it right up d again look at that brings it right up and then we can mouse around and manipulate it look at things kind of cool so that's a single page document in as a PDF worked out just fine what about multi-page this is where things get downright strange next one we're gonna open up our since it's tax season in the United States let's open up tax forms that's exciting here's a 1099 form now down here you see where it says first page and last page we're going to open up from page 3 to page 5 this is an 8 page document I only want to open up a couple of pay ages we're gonna click view and it's going to work it's magic now since this was just a smaller kind of a text type file and not a big color graphics file this only took about 28 to 30 seconds to open up and this is great we can see our our 1099 form here we could print it out if we wanted to but there supposed to be a couple pages pages 3 4 & 5 all we can see is page 1 whereas page 2 and page 3 all right there's the now here's the weird thing about go script you have to close down that page after you're done looking at it then it will go and open up the next page and you can see now the page 2 is opened up but what if I want to go back to page 1 well then you close down the program you relaunch it and reopen it and look at the first page again as far as I have been able to tell there's no way to jump back and forth between pages this is not a limitation of the easy GS program from Amiga kit this is a limitation of ghost script now when you get in here you can hit the spacebar any time like I said to look at the the options here and returning to get out so as you can see easy GS from a mega kit is a little simple nice way to be able to view PDF documents it absolutely works but now let's take a look at the other options like GS GUI GS GUI you're going to find on ami net just type in GS GUI into the search field and here it is GS GUI underscore 68k LH a it's 102 k and we can just click in here and we could download that all day long very simple program the installation is super easy you extract the archive and copy the drawer where you want it to go there's no assigns to do or anything like that so let's go ahead I've already downloaded it and get that set up we're going to do LH a e GS GUI underscore 68k dot LH a there we are done now we can go ahead and go into our PDF folder and there's GS GUI let's get rid of that make it nice and notice I didn't have to do any assigns but we will have to do what we did with the other program with ECG s single click it go into information GS Exe y equals go script : GS well not exactly let's call this GS exe equals GS 870 : bin / GS just like before now this is going to just default to a stack of half a megabyte if we remove these parentheses here we could then set the stack to anything that we want to but we'll just leave it at half a megabyte it should be fine now let's just see if this works we're gonna launch GS GUI you can see that the interface is a lot more in-depth than the one from easy GS we can control our resolution just like we could before change the number of pages we have to view that's fine but we have all this down here so let's take a look at what we can do let's go ahead and open up a file let's go to my Docs we're gonna go to 10 mark episode 59 files here's one this is 10 mark episode 59 dot PDF I bet that's interesting it's going to load up the multi-page document now here you can see it's it's got eight pages we're gonna look at page 1 through page 2 now if we don't do anything else and we just have displayed clicked here and we have this go button it's going to go ahead and it's going to open up the PDF just like easy GS does so this is going to have the same limitation and same capabilities now in easy GS I can hit that spacebar it comes up with my list of commands I can use on here I can only view one page at a time no matter how hard I try and the only way to go to the next page is to close down page one and let it open up page two okay so you can see that that works exactly the same as that the easy GS program but what about all this other stuff right here like use own screen what this does is this lets you open up the viewer on a completely separate screen so let's open up our picture again of the compute gazette magazine we're going to open it up as a PDF file we're going to tell it to use its own screen and when we say go in a moment after it's done processing it will come up and ask us what type of screen we want to open it on okay so here you have your choice of screens you have a choice of all of your AGA screens if you want to open it up in and then AG a screen that's fine I also have a choice of opening it up on one of my retina screens from a retargeted graphics I'm gonna choose a 24 bit 800 by 600 screen and now it should switch over and allow us to view it on a custom screen all right so now we are on a completely custom screen this is going to be useful when you're using this in a ga mode let's say your workbench is 640 by 480 in 32 colors alright but you want a nice pretty 256 color image on your PDF so you tell it to open on a custom screen you choose a 640 by 480 256 color AGA screen now you can look at your PDF file in pretty pretty colors you can also hit the spacebar but where's our little help menu this is a weird thing it opens up the help menu back on the main screen which stinks because you're on this other screen you're hitting the spacebar nothing's coming up you don't realize it's actually open this up on the main screen so that's kind of lame we'll go back here and then back to our new screen 0 to do a resize and exit out of here now this is an awesome feature here the conversion feature we've still got our compute gazette PDF file here we're gonna click on convert settings we're going to drop down device and look what we can do we can convert it into a PDF file which it already is but it converts it into an older version you can convert it into 16 million color bitmap 256 colors 16 color grey bitmap mono bitmap look at this we can convert it into JPEG images PNG images EPS files TIFF files down here this is really really useful for being able to take your PDF files and making them into something that's useful we're going to choose a JPEG and then we're going to give it a destination we're gonna put it in our Doc's folder we're going to under files episode 59 and we're going to call it computer JPEG I've already done this we're gonna do it again and we're gonna change this down here where it says display instead we're going to convert when we click go it is taking that PDF image of the magazine cover and converting it into a 16 million color JPEG image that we can now do anything that we want to with it now here it's done converting the file over we're going to open up our file folder new file called computer dot jpg in here let's try and open it up and see if we can view it or we'll use and pro my favorite program Universal loader computer dot JPEG now we're gonna look at it as an 800 by 600 JPEG picture and 24-bit color and look at that there we go it's now a JPEG image and of course like I've gone over in previous videos we could now convert this into an iff file and use it in any program we want to we could do this in personal paint we could do this in grim we could do this an ad pro it gives us lots of capabilities of extracting information out of the PDF files into a more useful format I think that's one of the the perks of this and that's one feature that I really hope that Matthew can put into his ez GS program now let's see what else is out there rno PDF is created by jpv that's what he goes by and it is by far the fastest and most reliable PDF program for your 68k amiga this is his website here I'll put the link in the description and down here and you see he makes this from morph OS Amiga OS for Amiga OS 3 Windows and the Mac just go to his website here and you can click the ami net link and it takes you over to Amy net and here are the files for OS 3 will download that and decompress it just like we do everything else and the file is called our n o PDF so we're going to l hae RN o PDF underscore OS 3 l h a decompresses all that now when that's done then you see that's a pretty big program we're gonna go to our PDF folder and here's our new folder called RN o OS 3 we're gonna go in there here's a 68 K version 68k with an FPU that's what we want close some of these other windows down and here is our cute little RN o PDF program and here is where the issues start this is a program for re targetable graphics machines only a GA doesn't care about ECS doesn't mean a thing to them retarget about graphics only that means if you've got a vampire you're good to go if you have a big box Amiga with a retarget of a graphics card you're good to go now I understand that's a limitation for a lot of people but if you've got the capabilities it is absolutely worth it now this does not use go script at all this is using its own technology now here's a cool thing let's launch our rno PDF software take one of our PDF files drag it drop it right in the little window and after a few seconds it'll open right up now this is about five to six times faster than any of the ghost script PDF readers and you can see it opens the file right up this is the tax document now look at some of these cool features we can go to the next page we can go to the previous page we can run a search on the document we can jump pages back and forward so write Omega n goes to the next page unlike the ghost script one where you could only load one page at a time and you could not go back and forth with the pages this one works just like a regular like a windows-based one where you can jump back and forth through the pages all you want to that makes it very very clever now you can also export the page as text export all pages as text export the pages as PNG files so it's not as versatile as the ghost script one that could export it into anything but PNG files are fairly useful files you can zoom in on images it's got different zoom levels rotate images gives you some nice capabilities if you have a retarget able graphics card and I have not seen many images at all many PDF files at all that this could not load when you download this software there's a donate button right on his website I recommend throwing them a couple bucks I know I did and he will then continue to support the amiga classic community rno PDF is the one to use if you have a vampire or if you have a high end retarget able graphics system it just blows all the others right out of the water now what about our poor OCS and ECS machines can they not get any love at all from from the PDF community well there is one program called a PDF that is still available now it's very old from the 90s it's based on a technology called ex pdf version I think 0.9 it can only open some very old PDF files if it tries to open some of the newer ones all I get are lock ups and crashes it's just it just doesn't do a very good job you can try it if you want to you can also try if you have a PC that with a full version of Adobe Acrobat on it you can save PDF files as older versions like version 1.2 or 1.3 PDF files and then eat a PDF could open those up for you I'm not going to go too deep into it because I honestly have had nothing but poor luck with it so what are my final thoughts on using PDF on your amiga well if you have a retarget above graphics machine or you have a vampire machine get yourself rno PDF i'll put the link right down here again and it'll be in the description pay the guy a couple of bucks and you will be a happy camper because that PDF program works perfect if you only have an AGA machine go ahead and get go script follow the instructions I have for an installment go script use either easy GS and hopefully Matthew will be updating it soon or use that GS GUI works perfectly great it's going to do the job for you not as nice but don't do the job but at least we can use them on our machines now in a perfect world the author of rno PDF would have a version that works on a ga or ECS machines may be launching in its own window instead of on workbench and then allowing that to be used as the display I've already reached out to him sent him a message and to see if he's interested in looking into that we'll see what he says but it's worth a try now I would like to take a moment to thank my wonderful patrons on patreon you guys are fantastic here's the link to my patreon page and I happen to have a PDF file that I've created to say thank you to my wonderful patrons here it is [Laughter] until next time be safe stay at home until this whole virus thing goes goes past us telecommute on your amiga now you've got all the tools you need there's no excuse for not telecommuting on your amiga like and subscribe to my channel share it with your friends follow me on twitter at 10 mark 1 and you know what's coming next until next time this is Doug from 10 minute of Meachem retro cast signing out