Viewers for Portable Document Format (PDF) and Postscript (PS) Files

PDF

The following PDF viewers are available:

Acrobat Reader is available for free from Adobe for Windows, Mac, various Unix flavours of the day and even OS/2
xpdf is an X11 based viewer which is not dependent on Motif or Xt and is available for just about any X11 platform (source and binaries) including OpenVMS

PS

If you are running an X server or an X terminal which has Display Postscript (DPS), then you probably don't need a separate previewer for PS files.

For Solaris under OpenLook, there's ImageTool and for DECwindows Motif there's CDA Viewer. If you are running an X terminal on these systems, then you will need DPS for your X terminal (since the X server resides on the X terminal, i.e. the display) in order for these applications to display the PS files. If you don't have DPS or can't afford a DPS license, then you will need Ghostscript and one of its previewers.

For Macintosh OS X, Preview can view PS files natively.

The following freeware PS previewers are available:

Ghostview (for X11);
GSview (for Windows and OS/2);
GV (for OpenVMS with DECwindows Motif) which also handles PDF files; and

All of the above previewers require the Ghostscript PS interpreter (also available for multiple platforms and free). This package can be obtained from the Ghostscript Home Page which also contain the latest list of previewers which work with Ghostscript.

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