[tex-live] Re: epstopdf bug?

[Nelson H. F. Beebe]

Lars Madsen posts pointers to

	http://home.imf.au.dk/daleif/original-ps.ps
	http://home.imf.au.dk/daleif/gs651epstopdf25.pdf
	http://home.imf.au.dk/daleif/gs550epstopdf27.pdf

and asks about the bad output in gs651epstopdf25.pdf.

I've been a ghostscript beta tester for several years, and have gotten
used to this sort of thing.  I keep 40+ versions of ghostscript around
to test just this sort of thing.
	
It does indeed seem to be a bug in gs-6.51.  

I made a simple wrapper script that tried each of these 6.x and 7.x
Aladdin ghostscript versions:

	6.01 6.0 6.20 6.21 6.22 6.23 6.30 6.31 6.32 6.50 6.61 6.62
	6.63 6.64 7.00 7.02 7.03 7.04 7.20 7.21 7.22 7.30
	
I skipped the earlier 3.x, 4.x, and 5.x versions.  I got correct
output from all of them, but notice that 6.51 is not among them.

Version 6.51 is absent from all of my architectures; my build-log
history shows that I jumped from 6.50 to 6.61.  Those builds are
from 5-dec-2000 and 24-Feb-2001.

Digging further, I found that version 6.51 is a GNU release, which
I've normally not built.  I got its distribution from

	ftp://ftp.gnu.org/ghostscript/ghostscript-6.51.tar.gz

but found it broken: it is missing Makefiles and configure script.

I suggest that you upgrade to the latest stable GNU version:

	ftp://ftp.gnu.org/ghostscript/ghostscript-7.05.tar.gz

or if you are adventurous, try the latest:

	ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/AFPL/test/ghostscript-7.22.tar.bz2

if you can get a connection (I cannot at the moment.)

Mvh fra SLC!

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