[OS X TeX] 2016 pretest and xdvi

[Richard Koch]

Folks,

Tom wrote me privately about this a couple of days ago. I can confirm the
problem, although I suspect the details are slightly different.

I have a 200 page document with a great many eps illustrations. After
the first few illustrations, SOME of the remaining illustrations show pieces
of previous illustrations “in the background”, but other illustrations still
display correctly. (The majority of illustrations are broken.)

I suspect the cause might be illustrations with transparency. If a buffer
for graphics isn’t cleared before rendering, and the illustration rendered has
transparent sections, then the old illustration could show through.

In my test document, eps illustrations created from a tiff scan seem
to work. Eps documents created with Mathematica almost always
have the problem.

I haven’t done enough experiments to know for sure. Tom told me that
the problem also appears on a Linux machine. Since Linux users would
be more likely to use xdvi, it is possible that this is not a bug but rather
a deliberate change. I haven’t had time to do an internet search.

TeX Live 2016 and MacTeX-2016 are in the final stages of production.
I do not intend to spend much time on this problem because I suspect
that very very few Mac people use xdvi. But if anyone discovers a
cause, perhaps a flag needed when compiling ghostscript, please
let me know quickly.

Dick Koch

> On May 5, 2016, at 10:00 PM, tkiffe <tkiffe at math.tamu.edu> wrote:
> 
> Xdvi and ghostscript don’t work together correctly when previewing eps graphics in a dvi file. 
> After the first graphic is displayed all subsequent graphics include parts of previous graphics.
> This behavior occurs in OS X 10.5 - 10.10. (I wasn’t able to test it in 10.11 because the 2016
> pretest file wouldn’t open and hence I couldn’t install the pretest there.) I think the problem
> arises from ghostscript rather than xdvi. If I replace gs 9.19, which is part of 2016, with gs 9.10
> graphics display correctly in xdvi. I see the same behavior with mactex 2015 (gs 9.16).
> Everything works correctly with mactex 2014 (gs9.10) and mactex 2013 (gs.9.07).
> The problem seems to lie with gs versions later than 9.10.
> 
> A sample file can be downloaded from www.math.tamu.edu/~tkiffe/tex/2016_xdvi_test.tar.gz <http://www.math.tamu.edu/~tkiffe/tex/2016_xdvi_test.tar.gz>
> 
> Tom
> 
> 
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