Shashank Date <sdate / everestkc.net> wrote:
> Hi Martin,
> 
> "Martin DeMello" <martindemello / yahoo.com> wrote in message
> 
> > Is there a nice way under windows to determine if the user has
> > ghostscript installed?
> 
> Searching for the registry is one way to do it ... see attached
> screen-shot of how it looks on my machine. Of course, you would
> want to determine this programmatically, right? Hint: You will have
> to require 'win32/registry.rb'

Thanks, I'll dig into that. Is it guaranteed that ghostscript will make
a registry entry when it's installed, do you know? I'm optimistic about
this because cutepdf
[http://www.acrosoftware.com/Products/CutePDF/writer.asp] says it'll
autodetect a ghostscript installation; I just didn't know how it was
done.

> > Do I have to rely on his having it in his path?
> 
> Well, path will tell you that gswin32.exe is available as a command
> without requiring explicit full path-name. It does not prove the
> existence (or lack thereof) of the software.

I don't get this bit. What I meant was, need a solution depend on gs
being in the path, and test directly if I can run ps2pdf or if it
returns an error. 

> > martin
> 
> HTH,
> -- shanko
> PS> I am curious to know how your postscript generation is coming
> along .. are you also generating PDFs?

Coming along very nicely, and yes, it's doing pdfs too (once I figured
out I had to call "ps2pdf.bat" rather than "p2spdf"). Right now it relies
on the fact that both ps2pdf.bat and gswin32.exe are in my path, which
from the point of view of a non-techie user is suboptimal; I'm looking
into autodetecting the ghostscript install and adding it to ENV['PATH']
before calling system().

You can see the code and sample output at http://zem.novylen.net/ruby

martin