CODEWITHSUNDEEP
windowsghostscript
eselk
eselk

Reputation: 6894

Programmatically locate gswin32.exe

My program needs to locate an existing GhostScript install, and run gswin32.exe (or the 64-bit version if installed) with some command-line options to do a silent conversion of PS to PDF. How should I go about this? I see they add some registry settings under HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\GPL Ghostscript\9.07, but I only see a LIB path (which has several paths) and a DLL path, nothing for the EXE. I could work backwards from the DLL path, I guess, but not sure if that will be "future proof".

For the type of app GhostScript is, I would assume they would make this part very easy and obvious, since a lot of programs will be doing exactly this. With all of the free "print to PDF" drivers out there, you would think this info would be easy to find, and maybe it is, but I sure can't find it. Hopefully I'm just missing something, because I don't know where to search, or the right keywords to find it on Google.

I'm tempted to use "GSLite", but so far the only places I've found to download this doesn't have any info on how to download the GS source code for the build of GS they are using, and I think that violates the GS license (not making source code available), so for now I'm just thinking I'll have users install GS themselves, and just look for it -- instead of making it a sub-folder under my app or anything like that.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 1075

Answers (2)

eselk
eselk

Reputation: 6894

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Artifex\GPL Ghostscript\9.07

After doing a registry search for a few different keywords, I found the above key which contains a (default) string that points to the install directory. I then did a Google search on that registry key and found some links to the GhostScript source code that sets that value, so I think it is safe to use. I would post those links here, but none of them are good sources (one I had to use Google's "from cache" feature, and the other was just a random person posting a snip-it of GS code). I'm sure it is in the official source code download from their website, if anyone else needs to confirm this, possibly a file named nsisinst.nsi, an install script.

Upvotes: 1

agentp
agentp

Reputation: 6999

try ftype (which of course may give acrobat or something, but worth a shot)

maybe some windows expert can tell how to acess the alternate apps list you get by right clicking a ps file...

Upvotes: 1

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