20 January 2009

New Opus plugins: Font, Postscript and CSV viewers

Dinkelhopper has posted three new Opus viewer plugins to the Resource Centre:


64-bit users should note that these plugins are 32-bit only, at least for now.

If you need alternatives that work with 64-bit:
  • CSV can be shown through the ActiveX plugin if you have Excel installed. (May also work with OpenOffice.org instead of Excel.)

    Update: Not sure where my head was at when I wrote this... I don't think using ActiveX/Excel for CSV works very well as, from memory, you get an annoying format conversion dialog when you open the files. That would be why I didn't include .CSV in the default config of the ActiveX plugin.

  • Postscript should be visible in the ActiveX plugin if you have Ghostscript installed and add the appropriate file extensions to the plugin:

    The Ghostscript installer includes a postscript viewer for Internet Explorer and the ActiveX + Preview + Office + Web plugin for Opus can be configured to take advantage of that. Go to Preferences - Plugins - Viewer Plugins, select the ActiveX + Preview + Office + Web plugin, click Configure, then add the .ps and .eps extensions under the Internet Explorer (32-bit) section. Those file extensions will then be displayed in the Opus viewer pane via IE.


    Update: Turns out this is incorrect. Ghostview does not provide a viewer that works in Internet Explorer, despite its webpage suggesting it does.

  • Fonts can be viewed via the Font preview handler which comes installed with Vista. (This is via the ActiveX plugin as well but doesn't require any configuration to enable.)

2 comments:

Morten Fjeldstad said...

I think its sad that 64 bit versions of plug-ins aren't made available at all / at the same time as the 32 bit versions.. Shouldn't cost that much to have a 64 bit edition running in a virtual machine for simple testing and verification??

Leo said...

Morten, I believe these plugins were written using Borland Delphi -- one of the readme files mentions Delphi at least -- which does not support x64.

However, people using x64 are probably also using Vista and thus already have a similar Font viewer which works in Opus, and can get a similar (maybe the same?) Postscript viewer via the ActiveX plugin after installing Ghostscript.