Bug#508528: texlive-base-bin: dvips without -j0 causes missing characters in output
Ralf Stubner <ralf.stubner@web.de> writes:
> The problem is simply that dvips cannot interpret the included PS
> image, since it does not contain a PS parser.
Oh - the DVI format still includes uninterpreted PostScript (the
included EPS figures)? Gosh. Now I come to look at xdvi's manpage I see
that indeed it does seem to call things like Ghostscript when necessary.
> I would therefore suggest to either close this bug or retitleit to
> "dvips should parse included PS images to determin used fonts",
> lowering it to 'whishlist' and tagging it as 'wontfix'. What do you
> think?
That seems very reasonable. Given `wontfix' at the Debian side, would
you be able to pass the wishlist item upstream? (Or is that done
routinely anyway?) Given that the DVI format seems capable of including
PostScript, and LaTeX-with-EPS to DVI to PostScript is a common usage
case of dvips, it seems bizarre for it to be so eager to attempt an
optimization it can't currently actually do safely.
I would put the idea in your mind of adding to the Debian dvips
manpage's -j option documentation a warning that it may not recognize
that characters from included diagrams are needed. I'll leave that
decision up to your judgment though. (-:
Thank you very much for your help, anyway. It's nice to be understanding
this a bit better now. It took me quite some time to pin down the
problem; if nothing else, I'm glad that Google will probably archive
this discussion ready for the next confused person! And I'm okay at my
end now I've added -j0 at the relevant points in my document-processing
scripts.
Mark
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