Monday, January 19, 2009

5) with fbgs / Investigating fbi

When I started this series of articles on handling pdf in text consoles, I had a different computer, using different tools for video content in consoles. Since then I've started using a frame buffer, and a tool for using a frame buffer to view .pdf's, fbgs came to my attention. fbgs is actually a script to glue actions by ghostscript and fbi, "Frame Buffer Imageviewer" together. fbgs accepts most of the flags for fbi, and a few of it's own. The most significant of it's own, to me, seems to be '-c', to render in color. fbi itself is a fairly straightforward tool, the most important command when using it being 'h', to toggle the help display on/off. Once you've got the help displayed, you can do most anything with it. fbi seems to be more minimalist oriented where the svgalib using zgv imageviewer is a 'kitchen sink' tool, loaded with features. zgv can be compiled with sdl, "Simple DirectMedia Layer" support instead of straight svgalib, so that it can use framebuffer images display, but I haven't done that yet, and it is another story.

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