[OS X TeX] Viewing PostScript in Carbon and save trees

Bruno Voisin bvoisin at mac.com
Wed Mar 2 09:02:24 EST 2005


Le 2 mars 05, à 14:01, Johan Glimming a écrit :

> I have been looking for a good piece of software to replace GhostView 
> in Carbon. My eyes have fallen on
>
> MacGhostView - an old project it seems? Not a useful GUI in my opinion.
> PostView - which has its own PostScript renderer, which is not as good 
> as
>            GhostScript in my opinion, and not as nice to navigate as
>            TeXniscope or Preview
> Preview - which unfortunately
>     creates .ps files and renders PostScript in 50% of all cases.
>     The other 50% have corrrupt characters.
> TeXniscope - very nice GUI and good navigation for PDF files, but the
>    two PostScript files I tried to opened got "No Pages" and nothing 
> was
>    shown.
>
> I would prefer a real-time PostScript renderer like PostView, but 
> built on top of GhostView. Maybe the best idea is to link TeXniscope 
> to ghostscript?

Have you considered using TeXShop as a PS previewer: when TeXShop is 
asked to open a PS file, it launches ps2pdf (GhostScript's distiller 
script) in the background and displays the resulting PDF file; 
alternatively it can also be set to use pstopdf (Panther's distiller 
binary, invoked by Preview as well).

There may be situations when Panther's distiller is more appropriate 
than GhostScript's distiller, for example when processing a PS document 
containing Mac OS fonts (I'm not sure this is deterministic and 
reproducible, but I've met this problem once). I also met the case 
when, wanting to include an EPS picture inside a XeLaTeX document by 
converting it to PDF first, I got bad results when the conversion had 
been performed by GhostScript and good results when it had been 
performed by Preview.

There may also be situations when a PDF file cannot be displayed 
properly by Preview but is displayed properly by Adobe Reader. I've met 
this situation, for example, when viewing one of the versions of the 
European Constitution Treaty available from the EC site: this version 
had been prepared with MS Word + Neevia Document Converter, and was 
displayed correctly by Adobe Reader but as a succession of empty boxes 
and random  characters by Preview.

Thus in any case you may use TeXShop (or the scripts 
/usr/local/bin/ps2pdf and /usr/bin/pstopdf) as a distiller and Adobe 
Reader as a previewer.

Bruno Voisin

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