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Last active May 3, 2023 09:07
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Opening .pl Interleaf WorldView PrinterLeaf files (and converting them to .pdf)
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README.md

This is more of a note to myself / a try to give the problem a bit more SEO visibility, so please excuse the probably weird writing style and structure.

tl;dr at the bottom

  • .PL extension is for "PrinterLeaf" files
    • They start with the magic bytes D0 4F 50 53 (ÐOPS)
    • Commonly contain header strings like:
      For: / Printed on: / From book: / Document: / Last saved on:
      Name: / Ausgedruckt: / Aus dem Buch: / Dokument: / Zuletzt gespeichert:
    • And for my test file they contained references to font files like:
      wst:helpvps14b / wst:futhvyps10b / wst:courps11 / wst:timsps2
  • Created by the Interleaf WorldView Software (pre-2000)
    • Software is very hard to find nowadays, did not find it anywhere
  • Got bought in 2000 by BroadVision and the document creation suite is now called "QuickSilver"
  • Opening the .PL file
    • QuickSilver 3.8
      • QS itself asks for a license, unsure how to proceed on that front, left it alone for now
      • Update: I've played around a bit with the key validation. AEAACAA896AAALSAAW698NBN8 might be a valid license key. But the error I got apparently doesn't even mean it's unregistered, it seems to be some kind of other error...
    • PL2PS
      • There is a pl2ps.exe file in C:\Program Files (x86)\BroadVision\qsilver.ileaf\i386\bin
      • It can be used to convert the PL to a PostScript file
      • pl2ps.exe -i IN.PL > OUT.PS
      • But fonts were completely broken on the file I tried, idk what to do there
        • It already logged multiple warnings like "%% Substituting font 'Computer Gothic' for 'wst:futhvyps:b'." and all characters were just rectangles in the output file
        • Specifying random .fni files from the /fonts directory with the -fni parameter didn't work either
      • There are quite a few forum / mailing list posts about "pl2ps" out there from 5-20 years ago. Maybe something more can be done on that front at some point.
    • WorldView 2.3 (from QuickSilver 3.8 Install)
      • But WorldView is actually a separate executable that's also just installed alongside QS
      • Can simply be launched from C:\Program Files (x86)\BroadVision\qsilver.ileaf\apps\iview\i386\bin\iview.exe
      • It'll complain about no font directory. Go to Edit > Preferences > General > Font Directory and enter:
        • C:\PROGRAM FILES (X86)\BROADVISION\QSILVER.ILEAF\FONTS
      • Now you can open the .PL file
      • For exporting it, simply print to PDF
      • Fonts were a bit wrong for the document I tried
        • Managing fonts would be done through QuickSilver, according to the help files.
        • As I couldn't launch QuickSilver, idk how to manage fonts as of right now
      • The help is not available through the normal menu (when opening WV directly), but you can just open the help files in WorldView directly
        • File > Open Collection > Add
        • Open relevant .cfg file from C:\Program Files (x86)\BroadVision\qsilver.ileaf\help
    • Binaries from QuickSilver 2.0 installer
      • The QuickSilver 2.0 installer sadly won't even continue without an authorization key, which I don't have. And I found no way to skip it easily.
      • So I used unshield to extract the setup files directly
        • But it gets extracted weirdly, probably because of how InstallShield actually uses the files during installation
        • I needed to move the relevant folders one level up (respectively: apps, data, fonts, i386), otherwise the binaries complained that they couldn't find some files.
      • WorldView
        • You can now use /apps/iview/i386/bin/iview.exe like explained above. With this version, the fonts that are used by my .pl file actually exists and it's more readable.
        • But the PDF output is not that great. The kerning is off and the text is inherently not selectable.
      • PL2PS
        • As the correct fonts now exist, we can finally use /i386/bin/pl2ps.exe
        • pl2ps.exe -i in.pl > out.ps
        • And to get a PDF, run ps2pdf out.ps out.pdf (from ghostscript)
        • Now you should have a pretty passable PDF, with acceptable kerning and selectable text.
  • The research was quite the experience, as basically all information is over 25 years old :D
  • Other helpful links:

tl;dr

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