Hi John,
On 06-Sep-01 jh Atkinson wrote:
I do articles for a technical magazine. That magazine, like others, including Linux ones, uses Apple Macs for publishing. You could save the magazine's type setter from being murdered
- and me from life imprisonment for that murder, if you can
help me with (at Syleham) conversion of a postcript file to a pdf one. I had this demonstrated to me (but not on my Linux box), using the Linux command, ps2pdf, but I did not succeed in making it work when I got home.
You need to have the 'ghostscript' package installed on the Linux machine. After that it should work:
ps2pdf file.ps
will create a PFD file file.pdf
There can be problems if the PS file calls for fonts for which there is no equivalent in ghostscript. In that case you need to make sure that the software used to create the PS file embeds the font definitions in the PS file.
.... My main reason for trying to use Linux is that I am working on communication for the deafblind. Many of the blind have not a hope of learning Braille.
And in any case Braille feedback kit for computers is horrendously expensive ...
Computer technology that can work fast and efficiently is necessary for my project. If Linux is the operating system to go for, and I believe it is, I am hampered by a singular lack of expertise.
There is a guy, Paul Blenkhorn, in Computation at UMIST in Manchester who specialises in computer interfaces for the blind, It may be worth contacting him:
paul.blenkhorn@co.umist.ac.uk
and see his web page at
http://www.co.umist.ac.uk/department/staff_details_ac.php?staff_id=PLB
(I see you're using SuSE, which has Braille support).
Apart from configuration of zip drive and card for two additional serial ports I am stumped by configuration of the SCSI card, and so the scanner. It looks as if no appropriate module is being loaded.
Not sure I can help you with that, though I'm sure others can.
Scanning is an essential. The idea is for the deaf blind user to secure an opened book to the scanner. The scanner scans, feeds its output to the best OCR software to be had.
It may be worth considering OCRShop, which is pretty powerful and available for Linux. I don't know whether it would be up to the standards you may want, though.
See
www.vividata.com/ocrshop.html
... I do hope there may be someone at Syleham who can come to my aid. I may bring the prototype chord reader as well as a couple of strange keyboards, if interest warrants.
I'm hoping to be able to get over to Syleham; if so, looking forward to meeting you. Ted.
-------------------------------------------------------------------- E-Mail: (Ted Harding) Ted.Harding@nessie.mcc.ac.uk Fax-to-email: +44 (0)870 167 1972 Date: 06-Sep-01 Time: 20:50:59 ------------------------------ XFMail ------------------------------