[pstricks] [animate.sty] producing a sequence of Pstricks files

[Alexander Grahn]

Dear Patrick,

On Sun, Feb 10, 2008 at 12:07:47AM +0100, Patrick Drechsler wrote:
>The reason for this is that my system does not provide the required
>GhostScript version.

Some Linux-Distros use ESP-Ghostscript because their default printing
daemon is CUPS. CUPS used to depend on ESP-Ghostscript.

However, the last ESP-Ghostscript, version 8.15, is _obsolete_ now, see:

  http://www.cups.org/espgs/articles.php?L484

Current GPL-Ghostscripts, starting with version 8.60, embody all the
CUPS related stuff. Therefore you can safely compile and use the current
GPL-Ghostscript on your CUPS based system. Just get the sources from

  http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/current/ghostscript-8.61.tar.gz ,

unpack the file, configure and install it:
  
  tar xzf ghostscript-8.61.tar.gz
  cd ghostscript-8.61
  ./configure
  make

As user `root', run

  make install
  
This will install it to /usr/local without affecting an existing
installation below /usr. Make sure that /usr/local/bin comes _before_
/usr/bin in your $PATH to have GPL-Ghostscript found first.

Alexander

PS:
>I would therefore like to create the animation on a
>different system ...
This is not necessary. For the creation of a multipage PDF containing
the animation frames the Ghostscript version _doesn't_ matter.

>... and than include it on my main document.
This step doesn't use Ghostscript at all, because now you will need to
run pdfLaTeX to embed the previously created multipage PDF.

If however you start from a series of graphics files in the EPS format
you still need Ghostscript >=8.31 for building the main document with
the (animate.sty based) animation.