[OS X TeX] Ghostscript 8.62

[Richard Koch]

Folks,

In the lull before the storm of constructing MacTeX 2008, I've been  
thinking about the three packages in MacTeX which directly install  
packages from Gerben Wierda's distribution: Ghostscript, ImageMagick,  
and the Font Utilities (primarily FontForge and the Fondu Mac Font cli  
Tools). As Gerben tends to other tasks, these packages aren't keeping  
up with the latest sources.

The most important is Ghostscript. I have constructed an experimental  
package using the latest sources as of Febuary 29, 2008. You can  
install this package, test, and then revert to the older version if  
necessary. I'd appreciate further testing, particularly since the  
package must run on PPC systems 10.3, 10.4, and 10.5, both with and  
without X11 support, and on Intel systems 10.4 and 10.5, again both  
with and without X11 support.

If you'd like to test, you can get the package at

	www.uoregon.edu/~koch

Please read the "about" document just under the package link before  
installing.

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On a related issue, I'm thinking about eliminating the font utilities  
completely, and I'd appreciate comments. I believe these utilities are  
primarily present to fully support Gerben's gtmacfonts package, which  
isn't in TeX Live. We do install iInstaller, so a rare user who needed  
the font utilities could easily install them that way.

Another reason to eliminate the font utilities is that the version we  
install does not support X11, so a person who wanted to use the X  
interface to FontForge would have to reinstall anyway. Since there are  
many binaries, it wouldn't be practical to use the "-X11" and "-noX11"  
approach.

----------

ImageMagick presents another problem. We distribute a version without  
X11 support and some users have complained about that. It looks to me  
like the ./configure step for ImageMagick will build in extra  
conversions depending on the libraries present, so that for example if  
libjpeg is missing the software will compile fine, but just not  
support jpeg. Since I don't heavily use ImageMagick, I could miss such  
tricky steps. One possibility is to distribute Gerben's version. Are  
there ImageMagick experts reading this message?

Dick
koch at math.uoregon.edu