Dear developers/maintainers,I am using Mac OS 10.6.7, 64 bit. After a recent "fink selfupdate; fink update-all", "ps2pdf" stopped working correctly. In documents where .fig files (from xfig) are embedded, some letters in text are dropped. This seems to occur randomly but consistently for a given document. I can reproduce the bug as follows:
(1) Create a LaTeX document using a figure produced by xfig. (2) Convert it to Postscript; output is correct. (3) Call ps2pdf on that Postscript file.(4) Result: in some instances, text in embedded figures is partially dropped. For example, "Analyze" becomes "Anal ze" or just "ale" or a different subset of characters, depending on the overall document. Very strange. Whitespace is sometimes added or dropped, too.
The dropped characters seem somewhat random: The amount of text in the document, and the overall complexity of the image, seems to affect the output. Furthermore, in my tests, only text in Helvetica-Bold was partially dropped, not text in Helvetica or a couple of other fonts I have tried so far.
The problem has occurred for the first time about two weeks ago, after a recent update of all fink binaries. Is it possible somewhere to see the history of updates, so I can try to downgrade ghostscript or maybe another tool that may cause the problem (ghostscript-fonts perhaps)?
Unfortunately, a manual downgrade of ghostscript to an older version (from source) has not resolved the problem. I wonder if ghostscript or a different component causes the problem. Is it possible to see what programs fink has recently updated? The web page only shows updates of the last few days, concerning all packages in fink, not just the ones I am using.
I have attached a rather minimal example: after gunzipping, bug.ps is a correct Postscript file with a few words (the text in red originates from an .eps file coming from xfig), and bug.pdf shows the output of ps2pdf, with some characters missing. Other ps to pdf conversion tools (such as Preview on Mac OS) work. Alternative tool chains (pdflatex, dvipfdm etc.) also work fine. So I think the problem is with ghostscript or its fonts.
This is a really weird bug, I hope someone can help me and shed some light into this.
My configuration regarding ghostscript/xfig is:
fc-ghostscript- 20050601-1
i ghostscript 8.61-5
ghostscript-esp 7.07.1-36
i ghostscript-fon 8.11-3
ghostscript-nox 7.04-3
ghostscript6 6.01-4
ghostscript6-no 6.01-5
i x-ghostscript-f 20020206-3
i xfig 3.2.5-1013
xfig323 3.2.3d-4
--
Regards,
Cyrille Artho - http://artho.com/
If someone had told me I would be Pope one day, I would have studied harder.
-- Pope John Paul I
bug.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document
bug.ps.gz
Description: GNU Zip compressed data
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