50. PostScript

This chapter includes applications that create, manipulate or view PostScript files and create or view Portable Document Format PDF files.

50.1 Enscript-1.6.6

Introduction to Enscript

Enscript converts ASCII text files to PostScript, HTML, RTF, ANSI and overstrikes.

This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS 11.3 platform.

Caution

Enscript cannot convert UTF-8 encoded text to PostScript. The issue is discussed in detail in the Needed Encoding Not a Valid Option section of the Locale Related Issues page. The solution is to use paps-0.7.1, instead of Enscript, for converting UTF-8 encoded text to PostScript.

Package Information

Enscript Dependencies

Optional

texlive-20220321 (or install-tl-unx)

User Notes: https://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/Enscript

Installation of Enscript

Install Enscript by running the following commands:

./configure --prefix=/usr              \
            --sysconfdir=/etc/enscript \
            --localstatedir=/var       \
            --with-media=Letter &&
make &&

pushd docs &&
  makeinfo --plaintext -o enscript.txt enscript.texi &&
popd

If you have texlive-20220321 installed, you can create Postscript and PDF documentation by issuing (does not support parallel make):

make -j1 -C docs ps pdf

To test the results, issue: make check.

Now, as the root user:

make install &&

install -v -m755 -d /usr/share/doc/enscript-1.6.6 &&
install -v -m644    README* *.txt docs/*.txt \
                    /usr/share/doc/enscript-1.6.6

If you built Postscript and PDF documentation, install it using the following command as the root user:

install -v -m644 docs/*.{dvi,pdf,ps} \
                 /usr/share/doc/enscript-1.6.6

Command Explanations

--sysconfdir=/etc/enscript: This switch puts configuration data in /etc/enscript instead of /usr/etc.

--localstatedir=/var: This switch sets the directory for runtime data to /var instead of /usr/var.

--with-media=Letter: This switch sets the medium format to letter size instead of the A4 default.

Contents

Installed Programs: diffpp, enscript, mkafmmap, over, sliceprint, and states

Installed Libraries: None

Installed Directories: /etc/enscript, /usr/share/doc/enscript-1.6.6, and /usr/share/enscript

Short Descriptions

diffpp converts diff output files to a format suitable to be printed with enscript.

enscript is a filter, used primarily by printing scripts, that converts ASCII text files to PostScript, HTML, RTF, ANSI and overstrikes.

mkafmmap creates a font map from a given file.

over is a script which calls enscript and passes the correct parameters to create overstriked fonts.

sliceprint slices documents with long lines.

states is an awk-like text processing tool with some state machine extensions. It is designed for program source code highlighting and for similar tasks where state information helps input processing.

50.2 ePDFView-0.1.8

Introduction to ePDFView

ePDFView is a free standalone lightweight PDF document viewer using Poppler and GTK+ libraries. It is a good replacement for Evince as it does not rely upon GNOME libraries.

This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS 11.3 platform.

Package Information

Additional Downloads

ePDFView Dependencies

Required

GTK+-2.24.33 and Poppler-23.02.0

desktop-file-utils-0.26 and hicolor-icon-theme-0.17

Optional

Cups-2.4.2

User Notes: https://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/epdfview

Installation of ePDFView

Install ePDFView by running the following commands:

patch -Np1 -i ../epdfview-0.1.8-fixes-2.patch &&
./configure --prefix=/usr &&
make

This package does not come with a test suite.

Now, as the root user:

make install

For Desktop Environment users, further (optional) instructions are necessary for properly displaying epdfview.desktop in the menu. As root user:

for size in 24 32 48; do
  ln -svf ../../../../epdfview/pixmaps/icon_epdfview-$size.png \
          /usr/share/icons/hicolor/${size}x${size}/apps
done &&
unset size &&

update-desktop-database &&
gtk-update-icon-cache -t -f --include-image-data /usr/share/icons/hicolor

Command Explanations

patch -Np1 -i ../epdfview-0.1.8-fixes-2.patch The patch does four things: fixes compiling with glib-2.32 or greater, corrects red appearing as blue with recent versions of poppler, allows the application to compile when Cups-2.4.2 has been installed, and fixes the display of embedded png images.

Contents

Installed Program: epdfview

Installed Libraries: None

Installed Directory: /usr/share/epdfview

Short Descriptions

epdfview is a Gtk+-2 program for viewing PDF documents.

50.3 fop-2.8

Introduction to fop

The FOP (Formatting Objects Processor) package contains a print formatter driven by XSL formatting objects (XSL-FO). It is a Java application that reads a formatting object tree and renders the resulting pages to a specified output. Output formats currently supported include PDF, PCL, PostScript, SVG, XML (area tree representation), print, AWT, MIF and ASCII text. The primary output target is PDF.

This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS 11.3 platform.

Package Information

Additional Downloads

Required Additional Downloads:

Recommended packages

fop Dependencies

Required

apache-ant-1.10.13

Optional

a graphical environment (to run tests), JAI Image I/O Tools, and JEuclid

User Notes: https://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/fop

Installation of fop

Ensure $JAVA_HOME is set correctly before beginning the build. To build the JIMI SDK and/or XMLUnit extension classes, ensure the corresponding .jar files can be found via the CLASSPATH environment variable.

Installing OFFO Hyphenation Patterns

Copy the XML hyphenation patterns into the fop source tree by running the following commands:

unzip ../offo-hyphenation.zip &&
cp offo-hyphenation/hyph/* fop/hyph &&
rm -rf offo-hyphenation

Installing a temporary Maven binary

Starting with fop-2.5, the Maven build system is required. We use the binary provided by apache, that we install in a temporary location:

tar -xf ../apache-maven-3.8.6-bin.tar.gz -C /tmp

Installing fop Components

The javadoc command that ships with OpenJDK 10 and later has become much stricter than previous versions regarding conformance of the Javadoc comments in source code to HTML. The FOP documentation does not meet those standards, so the conformance checks have to be disabled. This can be done with the following command:

sed -i '\@</javad@i\
<arg value="-Xdoclint:none"/>\
<arg value="--allow-script-in-comments"/>\
<arg value="--ignore-source-errors"/>' \
    fop/build.xml

The build.xml file calls for an old version of PDFBox components that are no longer available. Copy the updated PDFBox components into the source tree:

cp ../{pdf,font}box-2.0.27.jar fop/lib

Compile fop by running the following commands:

cd fop &&

LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8                     \
PATH=$PATH:/tmp/apache-maven-3.8.6/bin \
ant all javadocs &&

mv build/javadocs .

This package comes with a test suite, but the java infrastructure installed in this book does not allow running it.

Now, install Fop as the root user:

install -v -d -m755 -o root -g root          /opt/fop-2.8 &&
cp -vR build conf examples fop* javadocs lib /opt/fop-2.8 &&
chmod a+x /opt/fop-2.8/fop                                &&
ln -v -sfn fop-2.8 /opt/fop

The last thing to do is to clean what we have done:

rm -rf /tmp/apache-maven-3.8.6

Command Explanations

sed -i … build.xml: This adds three switches to the javadoc command, preventing some errors from occurring when building the documentation.

export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8: the compiler fails if using an ASCII locale.

ant target: This reads the file build.xml and builds the target: compile compiles the java sources, jar-main generates jar archives, jar-hyphenation generates the hyphenation patterns for FOP, junit runs the junit tests, and javadocs builds the documentation. The all target runs all of the above.

ln -v -sf fop-2.8 /opt/fop: This is optional and creates a convenience symlink so that $FOP_HOME doesn’t have to be changed each time there’s a package version change.

Configuring fop

Config Files

~/.foprc

Configuration Information

Using fop to process some large FO’s (including the FO derived from the BLFS XML sources), can lead to memory errors. Unless you add a parameter to the java command used in the fop script you may receive messages similar to the one shown below:

Exception in thread "main" java.lang.OutOfMemoryError: Java heap space

To avoid errors like this, you need to pass an extra parameter to the java command used in the fop script. This can be accomplished by creating a ~/.foprc (which is sourced by the fop script) and adding the parameter to the FOP_OPTS environment variable.

The fop script looks for a FOP_HOME environment variable to locate the fop class libraries. You can create this variable using the ~/.foprc file as well. Create a ~/.foprc file using the following commands:

cat > ~/.foprc << "EOF"
FOP_OPTS="-Xmx<RAM_Installed>m"
FOP_HOME="/opt/fop"
EOF

Replace <RAM_Installed> with a number representing the amount of RAM installed in your computer (in megabytes). An example would be FOP_OPTS="-Xmx768m".

To include the fop script in your path, update the system-wide profile with the following command as the root user:

cat > /etc/profile.d/fop.sh << "EOF"
# Begin /etc/profile.d/fop.sh

pathappend /opt/fop

# End /etc/profile.d/fop.sh
EOF

Note

Running fop can be somewhat verbose. The default logging level can be changed from INFO to any of FINEST, FINER, FINE, CONFIG, INFO, WARNING, SEVERE, ALL, or OFF. To do this, edit $JAVA_HOME/jre/lib/logging.properties and change the entries for .level and java.util.logging.ConsoleHandler.level to the desired value.

Contents

Installed Programs: fop

Installed Libraries: fop.jar and numerous support library classes located in /opt/fop/{build,lib}; JAI components include libmlib_jai.so, jai_codec.jar, jai_core.jar, and mlibwrapper_jai.jar

Installed Directory: /opt/fop-2.8

Short Descriptions

fop is a wrapper script to the java command which sets up the fop environment and passes the required parameters.

fop.jar contains all the fop Java classes.

50.4 MuPDF-1.21.1

Introduction to MuPDF

MuPDF is a lightweight PDF and XPS viewer.

This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS 11.3 platform.

Package Information

MuPDF Dependencies

Required

GLU-9.0.2 and Xorg Libraries

HarfBuzz-7.0.0, libjpeg-turbo-2.1.5.1, OpenJPEG-2.5.0, and cURL-7.88.1

Optional

xdg-utils-1.1.3 (runtime), jbig2dec, and MuJS

Required (runtime)

a graphical environment

User Notes: https://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/mupdf

Installation of MuPDF

First, fix the Makefile to link properly with the shared library:

sed -i '/MU.*_EXE. :/{
        s/\(.(MUPDF_LIB)\)\(.*\)$/\2 | \1/
        N
        s/$/ -lmupdf -L$(OUT)/
        }' Makefile

Install MuPDF by running the following commands:

cat > user.make << EOF &&
USE_SYSTEM_FREETYPE := yes
USE_SYSTEM_HARFBUZZ := yes
USE_SYSTEM_JBIG2DEC := no
USE_SYSTEM_JPEGXR := no # not used without HAVE_JPEGXR
USE_SYSTEM_LCMS2 := no # need lcms2-art fork
USE_SYSTEM_LIBJPEG := yes
USE_SYSTEM_MUJS := no # build needs source anyway
USE_SYSTEM_OPENJPEG := yes
USE_SYSTEM_ZLIB := yes
USE_SYSTEM_GLUT := no # need freeglut2-art fork
USE_SYSTEM_CURL := yes
USE_SYSTEM_GUMBO := no
EOF

export XCFLAGS=-fPIC                               &&
make build=release shared=yes                      &&
unset XCFLAGS

This package does not come with a test suite.

Now, as the root user:

make prefix=/usr                        \
     shared=yes                         \
     docdir=/usr/share/doc/mupdf-1.21.1 \
     install                            &&

chmod 755 /usr/lib/libmupdf.so          &&
ln -sfv mupdf-x11 /usr/bin/mupdf

Command Explanations

ln -sfv mupdf-x11 /usr/bin/mupdf : This symbolic link chooses between mupdf-gl and mupdf-x11 when running mupdf.

Contents

Installed Program: mupdf (symlink), mupdf-gl, mupdf-x11, mupdf-x11-curl, muraster, and mutool

Installed Libraries: libmupdf.so

Installed Directories: /usr/include/mupdf, /usr/share/doc/mupdf-1.21.1

Short Descriptions

mupdf is a program for viewing PDF, XPS, EPUB, and CBZ documents, and various image formats such as PNG, JPEG, GIFF, and TIFF.

mupdf-gl same as mupdf, using an opengl renderer.

mupdf-x11 same as mupdf, using an X Window renderer.

muraster is a program used to perform rasterization tasks with PDF documents.

mutool is a program to perform various operations on PDF files, such as merging and cleaning PDF documents.

libmupdf.so contains the mupdf API functions.

50.5 paps-0.7.1

Introduction to paps

paps is a text to PostScript converter that works through Pango. Its input is a UTF-8 encoded text file and it outputs vectorized PostScript. It may be used for printing any complex script supported by Pango.

This package is known to build and work properly using an LFS 11.3 platform.

Package Information

paps Dependencies

Required

Pango-1.50.12

Optional

Doxygen-1.9.6

User Notes: https://wiki.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/wiki/Paps

Installation of paps

Install paps by running the following commands:

./configure --prefix=/usr --mandir=/usr/share/man &&
make

This package does not come with a test suite.

Now, as the root user:

make install

Contents

Installed Program: paps

Installed Library: None

Installed Directory: None

Short Descriptions

paps is a text to PostScript converter that supports UTF-8 character encoding.