[tex-live] TL2005 and windvi

Harriet B Borton bortonh at rpi.edu
Tue May 9 22:29:03 CEST 2006


Hello Karl, George and Reinhard,

> On 5/8/06, Harriet B Borton <bortonh at rpi.edu> wrote:
...
> > Below is a short test file, and I'm attaching the windvi log file.
> > Among other things, the log file indicates that it can't find gs. So
> > I manually added gs to my path, but that didn't help.
> > Any ideas?
> >
> > \documentclass{article}
> > \usepackage{palatino}
> > \begin{document}
> > \section{this is a section head}
> > Some text here.
> > \subsection{A subsection heading}
> > More text here.
> > \end{document}
> >
> > -Harriet

Thanks for giving this your attention and for your replies. I
appreciate your help. I have to confess that I tried again to add
"c:\gs\gs8.15\bin" to my path and it mostly works now.  I must have
screwed up somehow the first time. But windvi doesn't behave the way
it used to-- it used to display everything after a slight delay
while it built the fonts. Now it builds them, but then can't find
them at first and won't display them until after closing windvi and
reopening.

Karl Berry wrote:
> FWIW, this seems to come down to the Windows-specific gs_locate function
> called from gsftopk.c:
> 
> #else /* WIN32 */
> 
>         if (gs_locate() == NULL) {
>           fprintf(stderr, "\nCan't locate Ghostscript ! Exiting ...\n");
>           return EXIT_FAILURE;
>         }
> ... 
> However, I could not quickly find the source for gs_locate, which would
> (hopefully) help guess what the problem might be.  Apparently having a
> gs.exe in PATH is not sufficient ...

Karl, your idea about looking into the Windows-specific gs_locate
function sounds very promising. But I searched my computer for any
file containing "gs_locate" and came up empty. So I didn't continue
:-(

George wrote:
> Are you sure you need .dvi support?  It seems to be fragile.  In many
> cases .pdf will easier to get working and we get nifty tools from
> people outside the overworked TeX maintainer community.

Well, I really like the quick preview. But my preferences aside,
there are many LaTeX users at this university who have always used a
previewer, and it would be a massive education project for me to
persuade them all to use pdflatex and preview with Acrobat (or
GSView, which doesn't need to be closed between runs). So I'd prefer
to be able to offer a dvi previewer, although I know windvi is no
longer maintained and its days may be numbered.
> 
> I'm pretty sure I selected ghostscript when I first installed TL2005
> on Win32 using the GUI, but if you can find the .zip files on the CD
> you can just unpack them (and maybe set GS_LIB).  After examining
> where the ghostscript bits were stored, I overwrote them with the
> current AFPL version.  I also replaced windvi with a batch file that
> runs dviout, which seems to be maintained and is very flexible (e.g.,
> RTFM is vital).  

I did not select gs during install because the version (7.07) is
old. Then after the TL install, I installed current versions of gs
and gsview. Maybe that's why it doesn't work for me. (Does the above
example preview properly for you? Maybe I need to look into dviout.
Haven't heard of it before.)
Perhaps if I'd installed gs *before* installing TL2005, windvi would
have been able to find it? Seems odd that windvi would have a
hard-wired location for gs. But if it's easy for you, could you tell
me where you installed the current gs? (I'm reluctant to uninstall
TL and reinstall because I did that on another computer and now I
can't reinstall. The installer thinks it's still there and comes up
with the "remove installation" window. But the remove procedure
fails because it can't find some files.)

Reinhard Kotucha wrote:
> ImageMagick depends on a lot of external libraries.  I think that
> integrating it into TL consumes too much time.

I can certainly understand and accept that. I was just asking
because it was included in previous Windows TL distributions.
> 
> I hope that TeXLive-2006 will include sam2p. 
>   http://www.inf.bme.hu/~pts/sam2p
> 
> sam2p can convert plenty of bitmap formats to EPS or PDF.  It is
> incredibly fast and produces extremely small files without loss of
> quality.

samp2p sounds really good!

-- 
Harriet B. Borton
Applications Consultant, Academic and Research Computing
Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute
bortonh at rpi.edu


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