EXTENDING GHOSTVIEW

Samara Almeida
(samara_dielle[AT]hotmail.com)
Suma Kuriakose
(suma.mk[AT]gmail.com)

under the guidance of

Prof. Uday Khedker
Department of Computer Science & Engg.,IIT Bombay.
(uday[AT]cse.iitb.ac.in)

This modification of Ghostview intends to solve a few problems that users face while working with the current version of Ghostview. We have included facilities to:

Search:
The document being viewed through gv may be considerably long, making it a tedious task to scan through the document to search for words. We have included a facility in the viewer that will allow the user to enter a keyword upon which all the occurrences of that word in the document will be highlighted.

Insert Notes:
The existing gv being read only, has no facility for inserting notes. We have added a feature that enables the user to insert notes at any position in the document. These notes do not change the typesetting of the document. The user may delete or edit notes as per his/her requirement.

Bug reports and suggestions for improvements (as also volunteers for carrying them out!) are wecome. Please contact Uday Khedker.

How to install the modified version?
How to use the features?
Limitations
Download
Future Scope
License

QUICK INSTALLATION GUIDE

Download the source and compile using the following commands.

$ ./configure $ make $ make install

The above installation procedure will overwrite (subject to root access permissions) the current version of gv on the user machine. In order to prevent this, the configure command must also include the directory in which the new version is to be installed, by using the --prefix option. In order to distinguish between the two versions, the user may prefix the name with some other string while configuring the same. This can be done by using the --program-prefix option eg.
$ ./configure --program-prefix=new --prefix=/home/username.

We have tried out the installation on a few common versions of Linux (FCx and RHx). Feedback on whether the installation succeeds on other versions or (Mac OS and Windows) is welcome.

USER GUIDE

The following options work only on .ps files.

Searching:
- In order to search a keyword in the .ps file
  1. Click the 'Page' button on the browser.
  2. Select the 'Case Sensitive Search ' or 'Case Insensitive Search' option as per your requirement.
  3. Enter the keyword in the text field in the dialog box.
  4. Click 'Search' to search the word.
  5. The word searched appears in red throughout the document.
  6. Click 'Done' if you have finished browsing through the document.
Note Making:
- In order to insert a note in the .psfile:
  1. Right click at the point where you want to insert a note.
  2. Select the 'Insert Note' option from the drop-down list. If the option 'Insert Note' is not available, perhaps you have customised gv and the customisation has been save in file $(HOME)/.gv which overrides the menu options available. Rename or remove the file and 'Insert Note' option will become available in the next invocation.
  3. Enter the note text into the text field of the dialog box.
  4. Click 'Done' to insert the note else click 'Cancel'
- In order to view the note:
  1. Click the note icon
  2. Click 'Okay' once you have finished viewing the note.
- In order to edit the note:
  1. Right click the note icon and select the 'Edit' option from the drop down list.
  2. Make the appropriate changes to the text.
  3. Click 'Modify' if u want to save the changes else click 'Cancel'.
- In order to delete the note:
  1. Right click the note icon and select the 'Delete' option from the drop down list.
  2. Click 'Yes' to confirm deletion else click 'No'.

LIMITATIONS

A few limitations still exist in this version of gv:

The viewer does not work for pdf documents. Even when pdf documents are externally converted to postscript, the viewer's behaviour may be anomalous.
The Search module does not take ligatures into consideration.
The Search module also ignores blank spaces.
Notes are not typeset. They can only be plain ascii text without the attributes of fonts, size, shape etc.
The notes can be viewed only when the page is viewed in the default mode, i.e. Portrait orientation and Scale of 1.00.
In order to view the notes, one must have this version of gv. The searched items can be seen with the default gv after the file is saved.

FUTURE SCOPE

The searched text can be seen using the unmodified version of gv or any other PostScript viewer, however to view or insert notes, one needs the modified version of gv. Hence this problem needs to be addressed with greater urgency.