PDF on SCO Unix

[Iain Harrison <iharrison -at- SCT -dot- CO -dot- UK>]

     Sorry for the late response - I'm still catching up after Christmas.

     Jonathan Leer writes:

     >>
     Rumor has it that SCO UNIX does not support PDF files.

     A client of mine has Framemaker-based documentation and wanted to put =
     the manuals up on SCO UNIX machines as PDF files. Apparently Adobe =
     Acrobat is not supported on SCO UNIX. Subsequently, the client is =

     looking for an alternative to PDF files for providing online docs. Are =
     there any tools for converting the Framemaker documents to troff man =
     pages?

     Or are there other products with reasonavbly priced (license) viewers?
     <<

     Sadly, Acrobat's claims to be multi-platform are far from accurate. When I
     last investigated, there was only one UNIX platform that was likely to be
     supported within the next two ears (but that was a year ago) and it wasn't
     what we wanted. Do you really need exact representation of the paper pages
     on screen?

     You certainly don't want to go to tron man pages - there are two better
     alternatives:

     1. Hyperhelp: This is very similar to winhelp, and compiles the same .rtf
     source code to produce a help file that is very similar to a windows help
     file. The viewer is freely distributable, but the compiler is several
     thousand dollars per workstation - too expensive for our needs at the time,
     so I never tried it.

     I did try a demo version on RS/6000 AIX Windows, which had source and
     complied files, and the viewer. I compiled the same source with the windows
     help compiler, and the results were very similar in appearance.

     2. A cheaper, and probably better option is to convert to HTML. There are
     web browsers for just about every platform, and you can ship the files to
     view locally.

     Iain Harrison
     iharrison -at- sct -dot- co -dot- uk

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