[OS X TeX] Solution: the ghostscript crash on metapost

[Gerben Wierda]

> Hello all,
>
> After installing TL2004 on saturday, all went well.
> But suddenly, problems appeared (at midnight :-) ) when I had to add a
> MetaPost figure to my document.
>
> Symptom 1:
> a TeXShop crash (which I never experienced until now) due to (so I
> think) to
> 	\DeclareGraphicsRule{*}{mps}{*}{}
> because including the graphic after conversion to pdf worked fine;
>
> Symptom 2:
> I added labels to my graphic - which caused GhostScript to terminate
> with an error
> 	Error: /undefined in cmmi7
>   when called by epstopdf.
> (That seems to explain the TeXShop crash: it cannot handle error
> messages from GhostScript.)

I got two things out of this. One is that gs 8.13 and 8.14 are buggy and
gs 8.31 is out and good. So I will update the ghostscript package later
on. But the real answer is below. You need to set prologues:=1; or you
need to use mptopdf which takes care of all  that.

This is untested on my machine, but I think this probably is right so I'll
pass it on now and look at it later.

On Mon, 25 Oct 2004, Hartmut Henkel wrote:

same error here. epstopdf doesn't trigger the tex run to embed the tex
string (IMHO it never did; i wonder how it should have worked in TL 03).
Do either

mptopdf --raw graphics.mp

or

mptopdf graphics.mp

Both give the wanted result.

Regards, Hartmut



On Mon, 25 Oct 2004, Hartmut Henkel wrote:

> epstopdf doesn't trigger the tex run to embed the tex string

utter nonsense, sorry. New try: the graphics.1 isn't a ready .eps file
as the fshow operator and the cmmi7 font aren't defined (but the TeX
part is done ok already). Therefore epstopdf can't work. E. g. if you
set prologues:=1; after "mpost graphics" you get the missing lines

 /cmmi7 /CMMI7 def
/fshow {exch findfont exch scalefont setfont show}bind def

in graphics.1 that make gs happy. In addition gs would need a CMMI7
entry in its Fontmap file to get epstopdf run correctly. Maybe the
prologues line got lost? (All this is simplified by mptopdf.)

Regards, Hartmut


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