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

[Meg McRoberts]

Thanks for this!  I'll try it.

I didn't realize that Ghostscript is used for printed
PDF as well as the online view but I guess it is since
I get the same ligature problem in both.

Does anyone know why I'm getting those 0m, 3m, etc characters
in my ASCII output from man?  

meg

--- Zvezdan Petkovic <address@hidden> wrote:

> 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
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> Groff mailing list
> address@hidden
> http://lists.gnu.org/mailman/listinfo/groff
>