Re: Lilypond not rendering PDF on Mac

[Tyler Mitchell]

On Wed, Jan 09, 2019 at 12:27:13PM +0000, Stephen Wilkinson wrote:
> It makes a postscript file, but it looks a mess. I'm now suspecting this
> stage is the problem, rather than the pstopdf, because it seems to be a
> struggle to get the postscript file to open in anything at all. Again
> though, it's making SVGs from Frescobaldi fine.

I also can't open .ps files produced by LilyPond without first
running 'ps2pdf' on them. If I try opening them in Preview, the
error I get in the system log is:

2019-01-09 9:40:52.859 AM Preview[13176]: PostScript conversion encountered 
errors: %%[ Error: undefined; OffendingCommand: max ]%%

I would guess that, if lilypond --ps test.ly works and produces a
PostScript file without error, then it's the ps2pdf coversion
that's failing.

If you have access to another system with Ghostscript installed,
you could copy your test.ps file there, then run:

$ ps2pdf test.ps

That should prove that the PostScript generation is working well.
(Or you could send the list a test.ps file and we could try it.)

> >$ lilypond -V --ps --pdf test.ly
> 
> This also hangs, and produces the following output.
> 
> 2019-01-09 09:18:03.956 LilyPond[4962:1292605] PyObjCPointer created: at 
> 0xa82d5290 of type {__CFBoolean=}

What I'm wondering is whether the version of Ghostscript bundled
with LilyPond might need updating for compatibility. On my system,
I use Homebrew, and I have a more up-to-date version of gs:

Homebrew version:

  $ which lilypond
  /usr/local/bin/lilypond
  $ gs -v
  GPL Ghostscript 9.26 (2018-11-20)

Version shipping with 2.18.2:

  GPL Ghostscript 8.70 (2009-07-31)
  Copyright (C) 2009 Artifex Software, Inc.  All rights reserved.

Version shipping with 2.19.82:

  GPL Ghostscript 9.21 (2017-03-16)
  Copyright (C) 2017 Artifex Software, Inc.  All rights reserved.

I am (happily) stuck at El Capitan at the moment, so I can't test
this easily on High Sierra, but perhaps using a newer Ghostscript
is worth a try.

Tyler