Hey everyone.
Does anyone uses PSView for DOS? PDF viewer for DOS, works nice, but is very slow with large files. I wanted to know if anyone knows if it is possible to make PSView run entirely in RAM (temp directory included) so as to make it faster... ? is it possible?
Thanks in advance.
PSVIEW as presented here can be used to view PostScript and PDF files from DOS. PSVIEW needs PDFTOPS, GhostScript, and LXPIC. In fact, PSVIEW is a user friendly shell for these programs: a PDF file is transformed to PostScript using PDFTOPS; a PostScript file is transformed to a series of pcx images by GhostScript; the images are viewed with LXPIC.
hard to speed up this kind of mess
Yeah, I know this is a damn messy process but AFAIK is the best (only?) way to view pdf files in DOS (especially if they contain both text and pictures). What I want is basically a way to run a dos program (any program, but in this case PSView) in ram memory, including temporary files created. This way instead of writing to disk (which is a slow process in itself) all work is done in RAM which is faster.
Maybe not possible?
You would do it the same way as any other DOS program: set up a RAM drive using xmsdisk (or any other such utility), copy the program to the RAM drive, and run it. Hopefully the program uses it current directory for temporary files; otherwise, it might use the directory specified in the TEMP environment variable.
But this will all only help if disk access speed is the limiting factor, which seems unlikely.
Perhaps you should try the other viewers listed at http://www.opus.co.tt/dave/ ?
Hey man.
Thanks for answering. I actually had given a try at MuPDF and was pleased with the results. It's faster than PSView, even if still far from perfect. I have to mannually adjust the resolution to get it right (actually had to do some trial and error on that one) and when you move to the bottom of one page and get to the next page that page is also at the bottom (instead of showing the top of the page first). Biggest issue is the fact that when you move around the page, it seems to take a second to re-draw the entire screen again.
All in all, I am much more happy with this one than PSView and it's the one I will keep using from now on. Does anyone have the same issues happening? Is the program still being developed?
Anyway, thanks for the explanation, I didn't know how to run a program in RAM, and your explanation put me on the right track. Thanks Jorpho!
