[XeTeX] ghostscript version

[George N. White III]

On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Mike Maxwell <maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu> wrote:
> We're using your pdfpages package to include PDFs into a PDF produced by
> XeLaTeX.  We discovered that ghostscript, which gets used in this process,
> had a bug in an earlier (c2007) version, which causes it to crash on one of
> the PDFs that we're including.
>
> The work-around is of course to use a more recent version of ghostscript,
> and that works fine.  However, we need (for compatibility reasons I won't go
> into) to keep the older version of ghostscript in its default location.  So
> I suspect the solution of using the newer version of ghostscript only works
> because I have its directory ahead of the other directory in my PATH.  In
> the interests of having a robust script, I'd like to eliminate this
> dependency on my particular PATH.
>
> I had thought that the pdfpages package itself called ghostscript (or
> created a call for it to be called later on), but the author of that
> package, Andreas Matthias, tells me that gs gets called by xdvipdfmx.
>
> There's no error msg from xdvipdfmx, the error msg in the log file is from
> the older version of ghostscript (and as I say, everything is fine with the
> newer version of ghostscript).
>
> So: is there a way to tell xdvipdfmx where to look for the gs executable?

Try 'xdvipdfmx -h" which will give you the "-D" option.   Then look
for the default
setting in the config file.   On mine TL2010, this invokes a luatex
script called rungs,
which serves mainly to handle the different default names (gswin32c on
windows and gs for the
rest of the world) for ghostscript.



> We're using the version of xdvipdfmx in the TeXlive 2009 distro.
>
> Andreas also wrote:
>> Xdvipdfmx uses ghostscript to convert some graphics formts,
>> e.g. while including postscript files. However it normally
>> doesn't need ghostscript to embed pdf files. Maybe it uses
>> ghostscript when you are changing the compression level of
>> a pdf?
>
> I'm not trying to change the compression level, so perhaps there's a simpler
> way to include a PDF than the way I'm doing it, which would bypass
> ghostscript?  (My way is to load the pdfpages package, and use a \includepdf
> command to include a PDF page in the appropriate place.)
> --
>        Mike Maxwell
>        maxwell at umiacs.umd.edu
>        "A library is the best possible imitation, by human beings,
>        of a divine mind, where the whole universe is viewed and
>        understood at the same time... we have invented libraries
>        because we know that we do not have divine powers, but we
>        try to do our best to imitate them." --Umberto Eco
>
>
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-- 
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia