Re: bundling ghostscript in mingw32 installer

[Ben Abbott]

On Jun 3, 2009, at 10:36 PM, Daniel J Sebald wrote:

> Benjamin Lindner wrote:
>
> > I tend to vote for bundling it. Pro: pdf printing works
> > out-of-the-box with gnuplot which does not have the pdf terminal.  
> > Con: larger installer, yet another dependency, slightly more work
> > when bundling (however, this should be a one-time-only effort, well,
> > more or less)
> > What do you think?
>
> Ben,
>
> I'd vote to leave it out.  Since these are system calls to convert  
> PS to PDF, I'd suggest testing during "print -dpdf" for the presence  
> of GhostScript and if not present issue a warning that GhostScript  
> is required for printing PDF files.  I say warning, rather than  
> error, because it wouldn't be user friendly to error out of a  
> running script simply because GhostScript is missing.
>
> Dan

You make a good point. The print command already checks if ghostscript  
is present, but doesn't do a very good job of using that info to  
produce informative warnings or errors. As I'm already looking at some  
changes to print.m, I'll add this to my list.

Ben