On Sat, Aug 28, 2010 at 10:01 AM, Mike Maxwell <maxw...@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 > maxw...@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 > > > -------------------------------------------------- > Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: > http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex > -- George N. White III <aa...@chebucto.ns.ca> Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia -------------------------------------------------- Subscriptions, Archive, and List information, etc.: http://tug.org/mailman/listinfo/xetex