Re: [Groff] Problems with man pages in 1.19?

[Zvezdan Petkovic]

On Wed, Feb 02, 2005 at 01:35:21AM -0800, Meg McRoberts wrote:
> - The PDF output is generally formatting okay, but there is always
>   a big space after the "fi" string -- so it looks like "fi lename"
>   and "modifi ed"
> 
> I thought as a first step, I'd see if anyone else is successfully
> building manpages.  And, of course, if anyone knows what my problem
> is, I'll be very grateful...

The culprit for bad PDF is Ghostscript, not groff.
The problem is that Linux distributions like Red Hat, SuSE and Mandrake
have to use GNU Ghostscript to be able to distribute it (license issues).
The latest version of GNU Ghostscript in most of these distributions is
7.x (e.g. 7.50).  The actual latest version is 8.0x but it still didn't
make it to the Linux distributions.  Versions below 8.0 have this bug
with ligatures.

You as an individual can use AFPL Ghostscript which is in version 8.50
right now.  Any version of Ghostscript over 8.0 will do.
Go to http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/ and download the latest version of
AFPL Ghostscript.  Compilation is really simple.
If you do not have superuser privileges, don't forget to configure it
with a prefix change, e.g.

        ./configure --prefix=$HOME/opt
        make
        make install

Also, do not forget to put in your .profile file:

PATH=$HOME/opt/bin:$PATH
export PATH

or in your .login file

set path = (~/opt/bin $path)

so that it overrides the system Ghostscript.
You may need similar change to PATH setup even with the superuser
privileges if your system has /usr/local/bin after /usr/bin in the PATH.
I used this strategy successfully on Red Hat and SuSE Linux systems.
Should work for Mandrake too.

Since the message goes to the whole list just a general comment.  If you
use BSD systems rather then Linux you may be able to avoid compilation.

For example my OpenBSD machine installs GNU Ghostscript be default when
it appears as a dependency for another program.  I uninstalled it and
installed the AFPL Ghostscript package (version 8.14).  The dependencies
for other packages resolve quite fine, and groff works perfectly with
it.

Best regards

        Zvezdan Petkovic