Steady! This page will hopefully answer the questions you want answered about why it doesn't work. If you don't see the answer here, ask me. If I can't answer it, I'll put it here. If you can help someone, tell me please and I'll publish the answer. Give and take, you know...
Because of my situation, most of these hints here are based on my setup (well, duh...)
Question: I did the './avclient hostname av.getactivedoc.asstring'. After a very long time, I got
sp_solo: RPC: Port mapper failure - RPC: Timed out
Can't contact ArcView on sp_solo. FAILURE!
Answer: Chances are your PortMapper isn't running (start it before starting ArcView), or you haven't hit the 'Map Server', 'Start Server' menu option. Check please!
Question: I tried to compile avclient, but got this message (or similar - this message from gcc under Solaris)
>Undefined first referenced
>symbol in file
>clnt_create /var/tmp/cca000Fi1.o
>xdr_wrapstring /var/tmp/cca000Fi1.o
>clnt_perror /var/tmp/cca000Fi1.o
>clnt_pcreateerror /var/tmp/cca000Fi1.o
>ld: fatal: Symbol referencing errors. No output written to a.out
Answer: Compile using the following command
gcc -o avclient avclient.c -lnsl
(that's two lowercase Ls)
Question: I'm using Unix ArcView - not Windows. Is there any hope for meeeee?
Answer: Yes! But in my setup, it wasn't fast enough to be viable. You can set up the ExportGIF to export a 'Postscript (New)' and then use Ghostscript with the following command to process it into a JPEG:
gs -dNOPAUSE -dNODISPLAY -q -g436x419 -r120 -sDEVICE=jpeg -sOutputFile=$1.jpg -dBATCH $1.eps
where -g436x419 = widthxheight. Amend your ExportGIF script to call the above where $1 is the unique filename.
Unfortunately, a typical AV EPS including bitmaps and vectors will take a couple of MB so by the time Ghostscript fires up and converts this, your client may be on holiday.
If you have decent enough hardware, or a bit of patience to try it, try exporting some EPS first and seeing the time Ghostscript takes to convert them. Most of the scripts are ready to go, so it would just be a case of importing them.
Ghostscript can be found here