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Introduction

GGv is the Gnome PostScript viewer program. The name comes from GhostView, a non-gnome GNU PostScript viewer application on which GGv is based.

GGv is a frontend for Ghostscript, an interpreter of PostScript that is able to properly render PostScript documents in a display or a printer. GGv serves as a layer that isolates the user from the cumbersome options and interface of Ghostscript, and, at the same time, gives extra features such as panning and persistent user settings.

The main features that make me personally like GGv are its antialiasing (use the preferences dialog to turn it on and reload the document - your eyes will pop out of their sockets so be careful) and nice user interface, allowing e.g. dragging of PostScript files into GGv, moving the PostScript display by dragging the mouse in the pager window or the main window. GGv can display more than one document at the same time. Also, the transparent support for compressed PostScript and pdf are handy.

The main GGv window

Every document has a main window. The main window consists of a menu bar, a scrolling pane, buttons for zooming and navigating between pages, a list of pages and finally the main view of the PostScript document.

• Main View. The main view displays the document page. If the monitor is large enough or if the page is small enough, the view will display the entire page, otherwise you will only section of it. In the sake of simplicity, we will refer to the main view as the view.
• Scrolling pane. The scrolling pane is the rectangular area at the top left corner of GGv. The scrolling pane is a visual representation of the complete page currently displayed in the view. The scrolling pane has an engraved rectangle inside. This rectangle is a representation of the current view (as displayed by the view) with regard to the complete current page. An example might be the easiest way to understand this: load a document, resize GGv to the point that you can only see part of the document; look now at the scrolling pane. The smaller the window, the smaller the engraved rectangle. We will refer to the engraved rectangle as the slider. The slider, as it name implies, can be moved around. Drag it around, and you will see what I mean. In other words, the size of the slider with respect to the scrolling pane represents how large is the view with respect to the document, and the location of the slider represents the location of the view. If the complete page is being displayed in the view, then the size of the slider is the same as the scrolling pane.
• List of Pages. The list of numbers at the bottom left is the list of pages available in the PostScript document.

There are several different ways to move: the cursor keys can be used to move in the desired direction, the spacebar moves in the direction of reading (assuming this is left-to-right and top-to-bottom) and backspace moves in the inverse direction. One can also move by dragging the scroll pane around and, finally and most intuitively, by clicking and dragging the text itself in the PostScript view.

Clicking in the PostScript pane will pop up a menu, allowing you to navigate pages, zoom in or out, recenter the page or toggle the visibility of menu bar or the side panel.

It is also possible to drag a list of files from the file manager to the GGv window, making GGv load and display them in different windows.

From the File menu, you can open a new viewing window, open a new document or reload the existing one. You can also close the window (which exits GGv if no more windows exist) or exit the viewer completely.

The Document menu lets you proceed to the next or previous page, recenter the page and set the orientation of the document's pages or zoom to one of the preset magnifications.

In Settings menu you can bring up the Preferences dialog or toggle the visibility of the menu bar and the side panel of the current window.

Menu options

• File menu
  • New Window. Create a new window in which to display a PostScript document
  • Open. Open a new file.
  • Reload. Read the file again and update the screen accordingly.
  • Print. Print document.
  • Print Marked Pages. Print only those pages which are marked.
  • Save Marked Pages. Save marked pages to another files.
  • Close. Close current window. If it is the only one, then quit the program.
  • Exit. Quit GGv.
• Document
• Settings
• About

Setting the GGv preferences

The settings dialog consists of four notebook pages: Document, Layout, Ghostscript and Printing.

In the Document page, you can set the fallback media type which is used if the document does not specify the media type. If Override document media is selected, the fallback media type will be used regardless of whether the PostScript document specified its own media type. Fallback media type should be set to a common paper format (like A4 or Letter) that is probably used by most PostScript documents you will display. The Antialiasing setting tells Ghostscript whether to use anti-aliasing when rendering data (ie x11alpha device as opposed to x11). Antialiasing improves dramatically the quality of the displayed documents.

The Layout page lets you choose whether GGv should show the toolbar and the menubar by default. Both menubar and toolbar can also be hidden on a per-window basis by using the menus or the pop-up menu.

You can specify the commands that GGv uses to call Ghostscript interpreter in the Ghostscript page. The "Interpreter" should contain the full path of the Ghostscript executable with any strange options you might desire, "Scan PDF" should be the full path of the Ghostscript executable with the options used to scan PDF files and finally, "Uncompress" should be the command used to uncompress gzipped PostScript files. You should leave these untouched unless you know what you are doing.

On the Printing page, you can specify the command used to print the document. The filename passed to the command should be marked with %s.

Possible Problems with GGv

If you are unable to load a PostScript file, check the beginning of the file (uncompressed if necessary). The file might not be a PostScript one or it may have been created on a system that uses a different character for line ending than Unix (e.g. a Mac). The simplest solution for the latter is to make a small perl script that converts the file into the correct format.

Command Line Options

• --geometry. It allows you to set the geometry from the command line.
• --spartan. Do not show the side bar.
• --nomenubar. Do not show the menu bar.
• --fullscreen. Use the full screen.

This document was generated on 17 September 2000 using texi2html 1.56k.