Re: Problem with accents on freebsd but not on windows

There are simply too many variables to even guess at what's really going 
on here.

Not least, most of these distributions tend to strip the third party 
library sources that we include (and QA against) in favour of the 
installed versions, which we have no control over. In this case, 
Freetype could well be the culprit.

I've tried 9.15 on Linux, and it renders the file correctly.

I would urge you to download the source for *our* release from here:
http://downloads.ghostscript.com/public/ghostscript-9.16.tar.gz

and build it: cd into the "ghostscript-9.16" directory, then 
"./configure --without-x && make". That should give you a self-contained 
"gs" binary in the "ghostscript-9.16" directory, so you can run it from 
there to see if it works correctly.

If that produces correct output, the problem is in the packaging, not 
our release.

Chris


On 18/04/15 12:49, Ian Lord wrote:
> Hi Ken,
>
> Thanks for the response.
>
> I am using Ghostscript 9.15 built from ports on FreeBSD (/usr/ports/print/ghostscript9-agpl-nox11/)
> I also compiled the port (/usr/ports/print/gsfonts/)
>
> So I am "building from sources" technically, but I don't know if the person that built the port changed a lot in it or not...
>
> I am a bit confused about the bitmap with white text on it, seems like text to me from what I can see (but I'm really not sure). William seems to say the same thing.
>
> Let say it's a bitmap with white text over it. What could cause the "accents" to be removed in this case ? Ghostscript 9.15 on FreeBSD removes them, but not ghostscript 9.15 on windows ? I'm really confused on what would be the cause, beside a bug in ghostscript, if it's not a font substitution problem
>
> Thanks again
>
> ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
> Ian Lord
> MSD Informatique
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> -----Original Message-----
> From: Ken Sharp [mailto:[email protected]]
> Sent: 17 avril 2015 15:22
> To: Ian Lord
> Cc: [email protected]
> Subject: Re: [gs-devel] Problem with accents on freebsd but not on windows
>
> At 16:27 17/04/2015 +0000, Ian Lord wrote:
>
>
>> I m writing here hoping someone will be able to help me with a problem
>> we have using gs to convert pdf documents to png.
>
> This mailing list is for people developing using Ghostscript, it is not a support forum.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
> Ghostscript is supplied in two ways, as open-source software under the Affero General Public Licence Version 3
> (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affero_General_Public_License) and as commercial software under licence from Artifex Software.
>
> The AGPL version of Ghostscript is provided 'as is', without warranty or support.
>
> We do value input from our free user community and we will fix bugs reported to us as well as considering enhancement requests. However, this is entirely at our own discretion and, as you would expect, our commercial customers are given priority over free users.
>
> Bugs can be reported (and enhancement requests raised) at http://bugs.ghostscript.com there are a number of other avenues open to free users:
>
> 1) The stack overflow web site has a small but active community involved with Ghostscript, as well as PostScript and PDF. Questions raised here will often get a good response.
>
> 2) The UseNet forum comp.lang.postscript again has a similar community of enthusiasts.
>
> 3) The Ghostscript developers can be found on the #ghostscript IRC channel on irc.freenode.net. Questions asked here will usually get a response though time zone differences can mean there are periods when nobody is available. The channel is logged, the developers read the logs, and will respond so even if nobody answers immediately hang around, someone will eventually. Alternatively check back in the logs later.
>
> ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> You haven't said which version(s) of Ghostscript you have tested, but I've checked back to 8.71 and this file renders correctly in every version I've tried, another developer has tried several other versions on Linux and they have all worked correctly as well.
>
> As William Bader has already indicated, your file does not in fact have all the required fonts embedded. However, the problematic fonts (Frutiger-BlackCn and Frutiger-Cn) *are* embedded, so it is almost certainly not a font substitution problem.
>
> The 'working' example is not, in fact, a font at all. What you have here is a bitmap image of the text, associated with that is invisible text, and that is what gets selected when you use a text selection tool. You can see fairly clearly that the 'text' where the accents is present is very rough when compared to the real text below. All the locations with missing accented characters are in real text, all the ones which are present are images, with invisible text overlaid.
>
> I imagine this was done in the 'modified' step which appears to have take place some 3 years after the document was created....
>
> The most likely reason for your problem is that your version of Ghostscript has been 'packaged' in some way rather then built from the source we supply. We supply specific, tested, versions of the various 3rd party libraries we use, in some cases incorporating fixes which have not (as yet) been adopted by the upstream maintainers. Packagers often use different builds of these libraries and in some cases force Ghostscript to use system shared libraries.
>
> To eliminate this you should, as William also said, rebuild Ghostscrpi from source, do not use shared libraries, and test again.
>
>
>           Ken Sharp
>
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