PLC Programming Archive

A

Anthony de la Rosa

> format. And if someone is using 'Bob's PLC's Inc" brand of
> processor, and doesn't have Adobe, they cannot submit.

that is the biggest problem, but before we go and panic, we should figure out who has a pdf writer and what plc platform
 
On Tue, Jun 13, 2000 at 07:31:15PM +1000, Jiri Baum wrote:
> ...
>
> > Does anyone know if there is a freeware version of Adobe acrobat out
> > there for generating the files?
>
> Apparently, ghostscript can do that - but I've no idea how well.

My Linux system (SuSE 6.1) has a ps2pdf utility. Here's its manpage:

NAME
ps2pdf - Aladdin Ghostscript PostScript to PDF translator

SYNOPSIS
ps2pdf input.ps output.pdf

DESCRIPTION
ps2pdf converts the PostScript file input.ps to the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) in output.pdf. ps2pdf uses gs(1). See /usr/share/lib/ghostscript/M.N/doc/use.doc for
more details, where M.N is the Ghostscript version number.

Currently ps2pdf does a reasonable job on filled/stroked graphics, on bitmap images, and on text in the 14 built-in PDF fonts in the intersection of Windows and ISO Latin-1 encodings. It converts all other text in the PostScript file to bitmaps in the PDF file (although it does only write the bitmap for each character once per page, and only on pages where the character is actually used). It does not compress the output at all, except for character bitmaps: it can't use LZW because of Unisys' patent claims, and it doesn't yet use other compression methods for images.

AUTHOR OF DOCUMENTATION
L. Peter Deutsch <[email protected]>

(end of ps2pdf manpage)

--
Ken Irving
Trident Software
[email protected]
 
S

Simone Stefani

Have you never heard about softCONTROL from SoftIng ???? Is a IEC61131-3 programming system for controller producers, it can be connected to almost every controller platform. Could be the
common platform where developing PLC application. Surf on www.softing.com

Keep in mind that must be represented the "advanced instruction" too, like pointers, structured item etc.

Simone Stefani
Automation Dep.
Romaco Zanchetta
Tel. +39-(0)583-2171
Fax +39-(0)583-217317
e-mail: [email protected]
 
J
So I looked at softing. This is not a programming package. It is a PC based control. It can connect to many controller platforms, but
not as a programmer, but as a data acquisition station.

This is along the same thread as the 'neutral programmer' idea. I still prefer the .PDF files.

--Joe Jansen
 
M

Michael Griffin

The Archive discussion seems to have died away, and the web site is still not active. Is there anything happening with this idea?

**********************
Michael Griffin
London, Ont. Canada
[email protected]
**********************
 
J
The website is currently in development. It has not died, it is being completed as we speak. The only thing left (AFAIK) is the administration
portions, and it will be ready to go live.

--Joe Jansen
 
M

Michael Griffin

With regards to the PLC archive question, I have found an interesting way of making PDF files which has not been mentioned so far.

The lastest version of Ghostscript has a "convert to PDF" feature built in. Ghostscript is a "free" program which you can download from the
internet (this is a full version, not a demo program), and there are versions available for just about any type of computer or operating system.
Ghostscript is a program which can convert Postscript files into a large variety of other formats. Ghostscript has a front end program
available called "GSView" which gives it a more user friendly interface. When I refer to "Ghostscript" below, I am actually referring to this "GSView"/"Ghostscript" combination.
It can be found at the following address:

http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/

After down loading and installing it, I simply performed the following steps (I am using a Windows 98 operating system):

1) Install a new printer device in Windows as a "Postscript" printer of some sort, but set it to "print to file", rather than printing to an actual printer. Set this printer as your default printer (you can change the
default back later of course).
2) Start up the program which will contains the data you want to convert to a PDF file.
3) Print whatever it is you want a print-out of. A window will pop up asking you for a file name. Give it a name with a ".PRN" extension.
4) Start up Ghostscript.
5) Load the ".PRN" file which you made earlier.
6) Select the "Convert" option from the "File" menu, and follow the steps through to creating a PDF file (this process was fairly simple and obvious to me, so I won't detail it any further).
7) You should now have a PDF file.

PDF files are based on Postscript, so the conversion from a Postscript printer file to a PDF is no doubt much easier than converting any
arbitrary format to PDF.

I have had a few problems relating to fonts. The symptom of the problem is that certain fonts seem to cause the letters to pile up on top of each other in the PDF file. This only happens with some programs.
I installed the fonts separately, and am not sure I installed the right ones correctly, so this may be my fault. I intend to repeat the
download and install procedure to try to correct this. If anyone else is familiar with this, I would appreciate any comments.

I created documents for the PLC Archive by using Wordpad to write the documentation about it, and then including either ASCII text "print to
disk" (from DOS programs) or graphics clips (from Windows programs). I then printed the Wordpad document using the above proceedure. Any word processor can be used for this purpose. Using a word processor as a base allows me to create a mixture of text (the bulk of the document) and code. I had no problems performing the conversion on the documents output from Wordpad. The
graphics images seem to be automatically compressed in the PDF conversion, with some loss of image quality.

In addition to documents for the PLC Archive, I have found Ghostscript to be very useful for creating PDF files from web pages. This is handy for those web sites which provide on line data sheets as web pages, but no PDF files which you can down load. Sometimes I need a data sheet with me when I can't get on line to the internet, and this is a convenient means
of creating a copy. It also provides a permanent copy in case the original web page disappears later.

Since making PDF files is now so easy, I would like to suggest that people may wish to contribute the PLC archive. Even if you don't have some especially clever algorithm that you are proud of, just some samples of well written code for various processors can be very useful.
There was a recent request from someone for samples of SLC500 code for example, as the person requesting this was new to AB hardware and just wanted to browse a typical program to get an idea of how people use them.


**********************
Michael Griffin
London, Ont. Canada
[email protected]
**********************
 
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