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FlWriter version 1.1 available (Announce)

posted by Rugxulo Homepage, Usono, 09.05.2012, 06:51

> FlWriter starts gs386.exe as a subprocess including a second shell and
> leaving cwsdpmi and its files in memory. On my PC this leaves 367kb for
> gs386.exe and that does only allow to convert small postscript files to
> PDF. You can shell to DOS from the FlWriter menu and run mem.exe to see how
> much memory is left.
CWSDPMI has a minor design flaw of keeping page tables in low RAM. Most other extenders didn't do it this way (and it wouldn't be trivial to fix / test). But "usually" it doesn't bite anyone. Though of course HDPMI32.EXE is much more efficient. You could just lump that in and call it via F.BAT (hdpmi32 -r, flwriter.exe, hdpmi32 -u).

> Rugxulo, I will also see if I can run strip with gs386.exe but I doubt that
> this will gain a lot of memory space compared to what cwsdpmi already
> requires. Yes, hdpmi32 will probably help - if you do not want to do it
> from the command line.
Actually, I just mentioned wstrip because of .EXE bloat. I have no idea if it affects the memory footprint. (Debug info doesn't for DJGPP, but I'm not sure it's the same for OpenWatcom.) I just thought it was worth shaving. ;-)

> I just tried it. Yes, wstrip will reduce the size of gs386.exe. But in real
> mode DOS I could make a PDF file from readme.htm with both versions of
> gs386.exe using the menu. It takes quite a long time though! I only had
> 285kb available not 367kb as mentioned above.
Believe it or not, here's the deal: you're using old CWSDPMI r5 from 2000. A DJGPP .EXE will always run the CWSDPMI that is closest to itself (e.g. same dir preferred over path), which in this case is less than ideal because r7 is more efficient (4 MB pages when using large allocations). If you don't want to use HDPMI32, you may want to at least use CWSDPMI r7.

For instance, on my PC, shelling out to DOS:

CWSDPMI r5 = 316k free
CWSDPMI r7 = 368k free
WDOSX 0.97 = 456k free
HDPMI32 3.17 = 583k free

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