[OS X TeX] Using Ghostview and/or another PostScript Viewer

Thomas Rike tricycle222 at earthlink.net
Thu Feb 22 20:08:59 CET 2007


I am trying to use \pinlabel in LaTeX to label eps figures I created in Intaglio. I used i-installer to install ghostview 3.5.8 (gv) in /usr/local/bin and ghostscript 8.54 (gs) is already in /usr/local/bin.
My system is a MacBook Pro 2.16 GHz Intel Core Duo OS X 104.8 with X11 1.3.1, TexLive-2007, and TeXShop 2.10Beta7 installed. I am co-editing a book and my partner is using Windows XP and Adobe Illustrator and Ghostview without difficulty (grrrr).

1. My first problem was to get xterm to open gs. /usr/local/bin is not part of the $PATH for xterm which is /usr/bin:/bin:/usr/sbin:/sbin:/usr/X11R6/bin and I don't know how to augment the path for xterm to include /usr/local/bin. I finally found that xterm -ls will login to the terminal and the $PATH there is /bin:/sbin:/usr/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/texbin:/usr/local/bin

Now gv is recognized and gs can be found, but when I open foo.eps or foo.ps the view only displays an empty bounding-box. I cannot find the coordinates for my labels if I can't see the graphic. The cursor is also an ugly "clock" like icon, but I can live with that. Is anyone with an Intel Mac able to get more than an empty display with Ghostview?

2. I then tried a piece of shareware called MacGhostView 4.3.1 by Thomas Kiffe which displays foo.eps very nicely, but ignores the coordinate convention embedded in the graphic and uses (0,0) for the upper left corner and (m,n) for m pts to the right and n pts down from the (0,0). This information is useless in \pinlabel. Has anyone used this software and found a way to make the coordinates correspond to the what the eps file says in the header, for example,  BoundingBox: 72 501 482 647, where (72,501) is the lower left corner and (482,647) is the upper left corner?

3. If there is no way to resolve the problems in Ghostview and/or MacGhostView, is there other Mac software for viewing postscript files and finding coordinates on the page? I am able to just run Ghostscript in Windows XP under Parallels and read the coordinates in Windows and then switch back to the TeXShop window to enter the coordinates, but I really don't like using Windows unless I have to.

Sorry for such a long posting. Thanks for any help. (I am still a beginner to intermediate user, so  filling in the steps will be appreciated.)
Tom Rike



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