Reading Postscript files

[minya!jc at tarnhelm.blu.org (John Chambers)]

| "Ron Levenson" <mathimagix at worldnet.att.net> writes:
| >I recently received a couple of postscript image files and don't know how
| >to view them.
| 
| Look for:   ghostscript   gs   ghostview

One gotcha that bit me: When I first tried running ghostview, it would
grind  for  a  few  seconds, then pop up an error window with bizarre,
incomprehensible error messages.  Asking on  a  couple  of  newsgroups
turned up no clues.  This happened for several months, during which my
only way of seeing ps files was to print them.

Then one day I happened to notice, in the console window (which is  in
a  different  "desktop" than I run abc stuff, so I normally didn't see
it), a curious message complaining about a program called "gs". Aha! I
had another unrelated package installed that included a program called
"gs".  I had never seen any clue  from  ghostview  that  it  needed  a
program  by this name.  Its error window didn't include the token "gs"
(or I would have seen the problem instantly). The "other gs" was in my
search path before the one that ghostview wanted.

I changed the order of the search path so that ghostview's  "gs'  came
first,  and  ghostview worked.  (Well, actually, it's sorta flaky, but
that's another issue.  I think it was designed to be flaky.  ;-)

Luckily I had the source for the other package, so I could rename  its
"gs"  to  something wordier, and both were happy.  If this hadn't been
true, solving the problem would presumably have involved  some  scheme
to have different search paths depending on which package I was using.

Anyway,  ghostview's man page doesn't seem to mention the subject, but
for it to work, you must have its "gs" command available and  in  your
search path before any other program by the same name.