[tex-live] Inclusion of large eps files with dvipdfm

Frank Küster frank at debian.org
Fri Jun 22 11:21:11 CEST 2007


Dear all,

I would like to hear your opinions about the Ghostscript options that
should be used in dvipdfm(x)'s config file for inclusion of eps files.  

The problem with the setting we had previously in teTeX and TeXLive,
"-sPAPERSIZE=a0", lead to the problem described at
http://groups.google.com/group/comp.text.tex/msg/3aeeb27907a7dbef 

namely that an image which was very large (multiples of a0) wasn't
included properly.  Back then, we decided to use a suggestion which
Heiko Oberdiek made, namely "-dEPSCrop".  However, this introduced a new
problem, described in
http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=428014:

,----
| dvipdfm doesn't correctly handle an eps figure whose lower-left corner
| is not at (0,0).  In some cases, the resulting figure appears in the
| document, but is shifted.  In other cases, it doesn't appear at all.
| Such figures are produced by lots of software, e.g. gnuplot.
`----

The submitter of that bug suggested to go back to specifying the
papersize, but this time not as a0, but in absolute (large) numbers:

>> >
>> > I tested Dan's suggestion: replacing -dEPSCrop in the config file with
>> >
>> >   -dDEVICEWIDTHPOINTS=500000 -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=500000
>> >
>> > solves the problem for me.

I'm not sure whether we need even more "0"s, or whether this would again
cause problems elsewhere (and be it only performance).

What do you think?

TIA, Frank

P.S. to Jim:

>> This is a configuration file; maybe the right fix is to just document
>> this (in the file and in some README) and leave the choice to the
>> user.
>
> It isn't marked as a conffile in the package, and it's not in /etc,
> so it will need a bit more than just documentation.

That's solved in sid, where it is a configuration file.  In etch, you
can just copy the file to /etc/texmf/dvipdfm/config and edit there, it
will be used (maybe texhash is needed, I'm not sure).

Regards, Frank
-- 
Frank Küster
Single Molecule Spectroscopy, Protein Folding @ Inst. f. Biochemie, Univ. Zürich
Debian Developer (teTeX/TeXLive)


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