Hi,
recently, many bugs got reported to Ghostscript upstream that certain
files do not display on the screen with Ghostscript, with Ghostscript
erroring out on them (links for example bugs below). It turned out that
the "x11alpha" output driver of Ghostscript is the culprit. This is the
antialiased X-Window output device of Ghostscript which is used by every
desktop program which displays PostScript files on the screen, perhaps
even by one or another program which displays PDF files, as Ghostscript
is also a PDF interpreter.
I talked with the Ghostscript upstream developers about this problem and
they recommended me to not use the X output devices of Ghostscript any
more, as they do not only have these bugs but also do not allow to
search text in the displayed file. PDF should be displayed with Poppler
and PostScript be converted to PDF using the "pdfwrite" output driver of
Ghostscript and then also displayed with Poppler.
This would also simplify the screen display applications as the
displaying is done only by Poppler and not sometimes by Ghostscript and
sometimes by Poppler.
Can everyone who is maintaining a PostScript screen display utility
(evince, okular, ...) look into doing PostScript display as described?
If it would be possible for Maverick it would be great, but at least
reporting the problem to the upstream developers would be nice. If it is
not possible for Maverick, we should at least change the Ghostscript
calls not to use "x11alpha" but the simple "x11" output device. This way
we can surround the bugs at least.
Till
http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=689150
http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=689340
http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=690664
http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=691410
http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=691411
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