[OS X TeX] Ghostscript 9.15

[Herbert Schulz]

On Oct 11, 2014, at 5:11 PM, Murray Eisenberg <murrayeisenberg at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 10 Oct 2014 13:30:11 -0700, Richard Koch <koch at math.uoregon.edu> wrote:
> 
>> Ghostscript 9.15, released on September 22, 2014, fixes the bugs which caused us to skip
>> Ghostscript 9.14 and ship Ghostscript 9.10 with MacTeX-2014.
>> 
>> I just released an install package for Ghostscript 9.15. See
>> 
>> 	http://pages.uoregon.edu/koch
>> 
>> This package will work on Leopard 10.5 and above, for both PPC and Intel. The 32 bit
>> binaries were compiled on Leopard and the 64 bit binaries were compiled on Snow Leopard.
>> The package also contains 64 bit binaries for Yosemite, compiled on Yosemite.
>> 
>> Apple has been pushing users to upgrade to their latest system, making these upgrades free
>> and compatible with recent machines. Their message to developers has been
>> "ignore older systems and develop for the latest release." In this spirit, I'll try when possible
>> to support the latest system with binaries compiled on that system.
>> 
>> Warning: This package hasn't been tested on older systems. Such testing is encouraged.
>> My web page contains Ghostscript 9.10 in case of trouble.
> 
> My OS X 10.9.5 system has Ghostscript installed also via MacPorts (in /opt/local/bin), and the Terminal command "which gs" shows that MacPorts version, which unfortunately is only at version 9.10.
> 
> Does this matter to MacTeX? That is, will MacTeX automatically look in /usr/local/bin? Or, instead, will it use whatever instance of gs my "which gs" shows?
> 

Howdy,

Unfortunately the answer is `it depends'.

In some apps the path to the distiller (i.e., gs) is entered into the app itself. E.g., TeXShop has a setting for the distiller path in TeXShop->Preferences->Engine->Path settings; it's /usr/local/bin by default so the version installed by MacTeX in /usr/local/bin will be used. Other apps may have settings like this or not. If you use Terminal to do your distilling which version being used will depend upon the order of /opt/local/bin and /usr/local/bin in the PATH variable; first one searched (from left to right) will win.

Finally, unless you specifically tell the installer MacTeX-2014 installs gs 9.10 so there is no difference between them. However, if you install the new gs 9.15 built by Dick Koch it will go into /usr/local/gs and the order mentioned above will take precedence.

Good Luck,

Herb Schulz
(herbs at wideopenwest dot com)