[PLUG] Getting ps2pdf working again

[Steve Bonds]

On Mon, 11 Aug 2003, Rich Shepard rshepard-at-appl-ecosys.com |PDX Linux| wrote:

>   At www.ghostscript.org there is no separate ghostscript-devel tarball! I
> seen on rpmfind.net that it's part of RH 8.0. Too many connections now so
> I'll keep trying to grab the src.rpm.

The whole *-devel thing is pure RedHat.  This lets them make the "normal"
binary RPMs smaller by not including libraries and headers that many
people don't use.

>   But, I'm very confused. What do folks _not_ running Red Hat do to get
> working copies of ps2pdf and associated tools if they upgrade their base
> ghostscript via the source tarball?

Upgrading a base product from tar can often cause problems for any
package-based system.  When doing this I try to re-package things so that
I can remove the software easily if necessar, though this is often much
harder than installing from the tar source.

Things I would try, in no particular order:
  A) Recreate things from RPM
    + remove the gs that was built from tar
    + install ghostscript 7.05 RPM (or rebuild SRPM)
    + install gimp-print 4.2.4 RPM (or rebuild SRPM)

  B) Fix ijs-config
    + note the ".in" on the end of the ijs-config that was found?
    + That means it's probably an automake/autoconf template
    + I bet it was built by your RPM packaging process, but left off
      the install list.  This means the .spec file you used was broken
    + Or it may be hiding in another -devel package
    + I can't tell you which since I don't have it on my system

  C) Try running gs manually
    + This command makes a PDF from a PostScript file (all one line):

$ gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dSAFER \
        -sOutputFile=<file>.pdf <file.ps>

    + This will probably give you the same error, but it's worth a shot

  -- Steve