Re: ps2pdf???
- From: David C. Ullrich <ullrich@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Wed, 19 Apr 2006 06:57:19 -0500
On Tue, 18 Apr 2006 20:09:48 -0300, "George N. White III"
<aa056@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
On Sun, 16 Apr 2006, David C. Ullrich wrote:
[...]
I see the problem has been sorted, but for the record, the next step would
be to enable command echoing in ps2pdf.bat and add lines to print the
environment variables. This would have revealed the problem.
Ah. Thanks.
[...]
Dvips produces resolution-dependent PostScript (usually set to a high
value under "-Ppdf", but if the resulting pdf gets scaled there can be
problems), which is a crappy way to make pdf's.
Should be ok for the present purposes: The final output is
going to be from the dvi, the editor just wants pdfs in case
reviewers don't have the proper fonts installed, whatever.
So it shouldn't matter whether the pdfs can keep up with
the final high-resolution printer.
If ghostscript has
problems with dvips output it is generally due to crappy EPS figures.
Actually, before I added the -Ppdf the eps figures in the output
were lovely (including text in the figures) but the text itself
was in an incredibly low-resolution font.
(No wait, in fact the ps was altogther ok, but dvips with no
-Ppdf followed by ps2pdf led to the situation above...)
Dvipsone was a much better tool. You might consider using pdftex.
Yes, that worked better, except that of course pdtex didn't recognize
eps. Which I solved eventually using epstopdf, but that was a pain
because I didn't have a local epstopdf available.
[...]
I've heard that there exists an epstopdf.py as part of many Linux
packages. I wouldn't know a Linux package from a hole in the
ground, but I wonder whether I'd be able to get epstopdf.py
working if I had a copy...
If you installed a distro like TeX Live 2005 you get perl, eps2pdf, and
ghostscript.
Ah. Lemme write that down. TeX Live 2005.
This is
sometimes packaged in a .exe file that uses kpathsea to locate the perl
script and then runs perl. Imagemagick's convert program is another
command-line front-end for gswin32c.exe.
Hardware that runs win98 should make a decent platform for linux, a much
more friendly environment for command-line tools and able to run current
versions of software with recent security fixes. Learning to install and
run linux is healthier than learning to work around limitations of an OS
being stretched far beyond the design capabilities.
Uh, thanks. I've actually been running win98 for a long time; no
security problems, various programming languages, TeX, whatever.
Command-line things work fine, except for ps2pdf; I don't quite
see how this can be an OS problem.
The problem with Windows is that there are all sorts of limits and hidden
configuration problems (.dll conflicts, command line buffer limits, etc.)
that you have to consider when trying to correct problems. With a
reasonable linux distro there are fewer ways to break things and more ways
to get out of trouble when something does break. My experience with
ps2dpf has been that *n*x problems have been easily solved, while a
significant number of people never get it working in Windows. Sure there
are many more people using Windows, but the split among ghostscript users
is much more even.
These days, most linux distros provide TeX and ghostscript, so things work
"out of the box", while on Win32 the installers don't always leave you
with working command-line tools.
I suspect another problem with Windows is that users simply don't
understand various aspects of command-line this and that, never
having dealt with such things. I know that that was a big problem
here - what the heck is an "environment variable" anyway? I wasn't
a computer user back in the days of DOS. That was a problem - there
were other problems, but they were all my fault, not Windows or
MikTeX.
Which is certainly not to dispute the fact that Linux is a
better OS; what you say about typical TeX/ghostscript installations
on Windows may well also be true, but it wasn't the problem here.
When we were running a satellite receiver (that had to be on the internet
to get control data and to pass on the downlink data) on Win9x there were
horrible virus and worm problems despite quite a lot of effort spent
trying to keep McAfee updated (updates often required rebooting which was
very tricky because there was an external black box that had to be reset
at just the right instant to get a successful reboot). If win98 doesn't
have security problems it is because it is no longer an "interesting
target".
Perhaps. I've been running it since 1998, with no problems. Of course
I've never used any MS software if I could avoid it, never had any
file sharing or such set up, etc. The fact that it's no longer an
interesting target is no doubt part of it, but there's a lot of
"features" they added to XP that are also part of the problem -
plenty of announcements of new security holes turn out to be
about IE and/or XP specifically.
Yes, some day I should grow up and learn Linux. Not today,
too much of the stuff I use doesn't exist for Linux (or
presumably doesn't, because it doesn't exist for Windows
either except on my machines...)
Thanks.
************************
David C. Ullrich
.
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- From: David C . Ullrich
- Re: ps2pdf???
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