[tex-k] dvips 5.86f issues; xdvi with gs 7.04

[Stefan Ulrich]

M Shell <mshell@ece.gatech.edu> writes:

> (4) I was also trying out the new 7.04 of Ghostscript and I noted that its
> new security measures break xdvi's ability to preview graphics if these
> graphics use relative path names. i.e., 

> \includegraphics{../eps/fig.eps}

> will stop xdvi from being able to show previews 
> (Ghostscript errors with "/invalidfileaccess in --file--"), but

> \includegraphics{/home/usr/eps/fig.eps}

> works just fine with xdvi. This looks like a GhostScript bug (and I have
> reported it to the GhostScript developers), but I thought you all might
> like to know before users start thinking xdvi is broken. Ghostscript 7.03
> does not exhibit the problem (but may have more security issues).

Thanks for pointing this out. Actually xdvik (which version are you
using?) doesn't pass the relative path to gs, but it prepends
the current DVI file path, so that

\includegraphics{../eps/fig.eps} in a file /home/usr/tex/test.dvi
will yield
/home/usr/tex/../eps/fig.eps
(and if that fails, it will try a kpathsearch on the PS file).

(You can test by looking at the output of `xdvi -debug 32').

So it seems that gs doesn't allow `..' in path names. (Is this in
secure mode only? `-nogssafer' will turn off the `-dSAFER' option
of gs).

If the ghostscript people don't have a fix for the problem, we
probably could try to implement a workaround that expands the
`..' part before passing it to gs - what do the others think?

Best regards,
Stefan
-- 
Stefan Ulrich