Comments on: A Simple C# Wrapper for Ghostscript

By: Dennis Vasek

Dennis Vasek — Tue, 28 Jun 2011 16:27:55 +0000

Great work Matthew!

Do you know of anyway to use Ghostscript to process in memory data rather than having to deal with physical files?

Thanks!

By: Alec

Alec — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 08:32:12 +0000

Just like to say, great piece of work - really helped me out on a project I’m working on.

By: Ramón Muntané

Ramón Muntané — Wed, 06 Apr 2011 14:00:29 +0000

Hello. Long ago I took his example for use in a Web application. My PC are64bits but perfectly working with gsdll32.dll. Going up the Web application Server (64bit) I get an error that the format of the dll I try to read is incorrect.
[BadImageFormatException: Se ha intentado cargar un programa con un formato incorrecto. (Excepción de HRESULT: 0x8007000B)]
GWS_Class.MADcPDFtoImage.gsapi_new_instance(IntPtr& lngGSInstance, IntPtr lngCallerHandle) +0
GWS_Class.MADcPDFtoImage.CallGS(String[] astrGSArgs) in C:\Users\Usuario\Documents\Visual Studio 2010\Projects\GWS\GWS_Class\MADcPDFtoImage.vb:554

By: jgeorge

jgeorge — Thu, 10 Mar 2011 20:36:49 +0000

My question is a little off the mark, but I can’t find an answer anywhere. Is there a way, through C# code, to query a user’s machine to see if any version of GhostScript is installed?

By: alehro

alehro — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 10:53:56 +0000

If you need redistribute your program and be selfcontatained:
1. copy ghostscript installation directory near to your binary.
2.
string prc_path = Path.GetDirectoryName(Process.GetCurrentProcess().MainModule.FileName);
Environment.SetEnvironmentVariable(”GS_LIB”, Path.Combine(prc_path, @”gs8.63\lib”) +
“;” + Path.Combine(prc_path, @”gs8.63\Resource”));

By: alehro

alehro — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:57:26 +0000

I see some guys are trying to put dll into project references. You don’t need to do so. All you need is to place dll near to your application binary.

By: alehro

alehro — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 09:51:41 +0000

Great article. All works fine at MSVC2010 Windows7×64. Although I was forced to set project settings -> build -> platform target to AnyCPU. Without it I had exception BadImageFormatException while calling CreateAPIInstance. I don’t even know what does it mean.

By: Siva

Siva — Tue, 18 Jan 2011 21:27:20 +0000

Hi Matt,

I could add gsdll32.dll as reference to my project.
How should I use it. Can you please throw some light on that.

By: Brett VanderHaar » Blog Archive » PHP & Windows Server 2008/IIS7 “Unable To Fork” Error with GhostScript - .blog()

Thu, 28 Oct 2010 15:13:03 +0000

[...] This handles the PDF to PNG conversion with the GhostScript library. My code looks very similar to Matt‘s, I modified his code a little bit to keep things simple & used the 64-bit GhostScript [...]

By: ND

ND — Tue, 24 Aug 2010 13:17:57 +0000

Hi,

We are working on a product which requires a similar functionality of having the thumbnail generated for all the pdf files selected.
After reading and researching a lot I am totally confused as our solution is hosted on godaddy and not sure if we could use your solution? We don’t have control over the box. Will your solution still fit my needs?

Secondly for most of the solution that I read they had a pre-requisite of having the Adobe Acrobat to be installed (not reader) but fully licensed version? Is it required in this case?

By: Juan C. Luna H.

Juan C. Luna H. — Wed, 11 Aug 2010 22:21:13 +0000

> Update: Here is the code I used to convert the arguments to
> null terminated byte arrays. There might be a better way to
> do this in .Net, this is just the quick solution I’m using.

You can use this code:
public static byte[] StringToAnsi(string original)
{
return System.Text.Encoding.ASCII.GetBytes(original + “”);
}

By: Shahrooz

Shahrooz — Sat, 03 Apr 2010 10:38:20 +0000

Hi,
Thanks for code,
But I have a problem and that is , when I call InitAPI it return a -100 error number, I dont know how solve the problem could u help me?

Thanks again

By: Klaus

Klaus — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 13:03:18 +0000

Hello,

thanks for this great library. I have a problem getting this work on a webapplication. when i debug my webapplication (”F5″ in Visual Studio 2008) it works great. But when i access the webapplication outside of vs2008 (http://localhost/…) the JPG doesn’t get generated. There is also no exception thrown.

The GS Bin is set in the PATH variable. The gsdll32.dll is in my system32-folder.

Maybe the security settings of the IIS-Server are wrong?

greetings
Klaus

By: Tobias

Tobias — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:28:48 +0000

of course the first argument in the variable “args” has to be empty “” not the first argument of the method InitAPI

By: Tobias

Tobias — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 15:26:58 +0000

hi,

there is a lille error in your Wrapper.
The first argument of the arguments you supply in
the method InitAPI(gsInstancePtr, args.Length, args)
is allways ignored by the dll.

So your arguments should start with

return new[]
{
“”,
“-q”,
“-dQUIET”,
….

maybe you didn’t recognize this behavior because -q and -dQuit do the same.

Tobias

By: Nike

Nike — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 09:17:07 +0000

SPan,

You don’t need to add DLL to references. This is not .NET but native PE file (Windows DLL).

Ghostscript should be installed with all it’s libraries, and PATH variable should contain gs bin folder (”C:\Program Files\gs\gs8.70\bin” or other directory where you have gs installed )

By: SPan

SPan — Fri, 04 Dec 2009 05:32:22 +0000

Hi,

I’ve tried to use your code in Windows 7 and Windows XP with visualstudio 2008.When I try to add refrenece for gsdll32.dll to a Windows Forms project I got an error saying it is not a valid com component (gsdll32.dll)

Any idea how to overcome from this error and able to run the program?

Thanks

By: Blasius Riz

Blasius Riz — Wed, 04 Nov 2009 12:12:38 +0000

Really the nicest wrapper for Ghostscript I have stumbled upon so far, great!
I have a question for you or anyone else out there who is using a ghostscript wrapper. I´m currently building a tool used in house under windows 7, 64 Bit, VS 2008, .NET 3.5.
I had the problem that ghostscript sometimes crashed with a AccessViolationException, this reproducibly happend when converting imageheavy PDF files. From my tests, I assume that exit and delete_instance didn´t close properly and ghostscript failed to create a new instance thereafter.
The crashes occured with both versions of ghostscript 8.70 and 8.64.
After I ran some tests on a Windows XP VM, I found out that the crashes didn´t happen when the application ran in 32 bit mode. So indeed, once I switched the build settings from Any CPU to x86, the chrashes stopped from happening.
Did anyone else have this problem and maybe found a solution other than targeting x86?
This is not a major showstopper yet, since all of our regular workstations in house run Windows XP 32 bit, but someday we will make the transit to windows 7 and maybe even 64 bit mode, so it would be nice to target x64 for those setups. On a side note, I used the 64 bit Version of ghostscript on the 64 bit setup if anyone wonders.

By: Matthew Ephraim

Matthew Ephraim — Sat, 19 Sep 2009 18:30:03 +0000

@Troy,

Thanks for posting this. I honestly had never run across your project before, but I’m glad there’s a project out there that appears to be further along than I am.

By: Troy Howard

Troy Howard — Wed, 16 Sep 2009 18:01:01 +0000

Matthew — This looks great! I don’t know if you know this already or not, but there’s already an open source project that is solving the same problem (in much the same way), called Gouda. It’s on Google’s code hosting service at:

http://code.google.com/p/gouda/

I started in on some work to implement the drawing surface callbacks. Right now, the text based callbacks for output/errors works, but I haven’t successfully built a fully functional graphics surface for Ghostscript to render to. Haven’t had much time to work on it lately, so not much has changed in the past year.

If you, or anyone else would like to help out with that project, we could probably get more work done as a team, rather than having multiple projects.

Also, for those of you who are interested in leveraging all the wonderful open source PostScript tools out there in your .Net code, there’s another project that I started called Parrano which is a wrapper to PsLib ( http://code.google.com/p/parrano/ ).

Thanks,
Troy