FS-UAE - Printing to PDF on a Mac?

[roberthazelby]

Evening all,

Is it possible to print to PDF using FS-UAE on a Mac? I've searched through numerous forum posts on here, and even printing to PDF using Windows seems to have had limited results (unless I've missed something).

Can printing to PDF using FS-UAE on a Mac be done? If so, would someone be kind enough to explain how, please? I'd like to print graphics - not just text.

Many thanks for any help!

[FrodeSolheim]

I haven't done anything with regards to supporting printing under FS-UAE :-/

But I see WinUAE has code for passing postscript data to Ghostscript on the host, so it would probably be feasible to implement something like that for FS-UAE. With a postscript printer driver on the Amiga side, and a postscript-to-PDF post-processing step on the host side, printing to PDF should be possible. If someone writes the necessary postscript printing support code for FS-UAE.

[Korodny]

If the application can print to Postscript, it should also support printing to a file. Just do that and use an online converter (or something running on the Mac) to convert the resulting file from PS to PDF. This will give you the best quality since text will be sent to the 'printer' as actual (Postscript) text instead of being rendered into a (lower resolution) bitmap that gets embedded in a Postscript document - so you should use that approach even if FS-UAE could print to PDF.

You can automate the PS->PDF conversion for most applications supporting Postscript output using a batch script written in Rexx and Amiga native Ghostscript, but you'd have to give us some information on what applications you're using to get more info on that.

If the application doesn't support Postscript, use the system's postscript driver and configure it to print to a file. On OS4, you do that using printtofile.device, I can't remember if it was the same on OS3 - it's been too long. The resulting Postscript file needs to be converted from PS to PDF as well.

[cmunk]

Yes, as Korodny writes, you can generate the PDF directly on the Amiga side using Ghostscript once you have a Postscript file from your application.
The actual Ghostscript command I use for this is

gs:bin/gs >NIL: -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dQUIET -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=yourPDFfile.pdf yourPSfile.ps

with Ghostscript 8.60. But as Korodny also writes, you need to provide info on the actual app you want to print from to get further help on a small script to automate it.

Alternatively, the PS file can be opened directly on the Mac by Preview. From here you can either save as PDF or send to a printer. This is faster than creating the PDF on the Amiga side, at least on my system.