[tex-live] TL2005 and windvi

gnwiii at gmail.com gnwiii at gmail.com
Tue May 9 01:37:36 CEST 2006


On 5/8/06, Harriet B Borton <bortonh at rpi.edu> wrote:
> Hello,
> I'm using TL2005 on Windows, and I've have a problem with windvi
> when my .tex file includes a command such as \usepackage(times} or
> \usepackage{palatino).
> windvi can't make the screen fonts, and the headings (bold) don't
> show up. The normal (roman) text does appear, but it appears that
> windvi is substituting cm in this case. (The .ps file and the .pdf
> file look fine.)
> In TL2003, the last version I was using, windvi didn't have this
> problem.
>
> Below is a short test file, and I'm attaching the windvi log file.
> Among other things, the log file indicates that it can't find gs. So
> I manually added gs to my path, but that didn't help.
> Any ideas?
>
> \documentclass{article}
> \usepackage{palatino}
> \begin{document}
> \section{this is a section head}
> Some text here.
> \subsection{A subsection heading}
> More text here.
> \end{document}
>
> -Harriet
>
> PS I also don't have ImageMagick. I didn't see a place during the
> installation where I could select that. Does anyone know how to
> select that while installing?

Are you sure you need .dvi support?  It seems to be fragile.  In many
cases .pdf will easier to get working and we get nifty tools from
people outside the overworked TeX maintainer community.

I'm pretty sure I selected ghostscript when I first installed TL2005
on Win32 using the GUI, but if you can find the .zip files on the CD
you can just unpack them (and maybe set GS_LIB).  After examining
where the ghostscript bits were stored, I overwrote them with the
current AFPL version.  I also replaced windvi with a batch file that
runs dviout, which seems to be maintained and is very flexible (e.g.,
RTFM is vital).  I have ImageMagick installed separately, so I'm not
sure if it was in TL2005.  At some point I also ran into problems with
the version of perl in TL2005, so I also installed ActiveState perl. 
I think the lesson is that the TL community can't keep up with the 3rd
party tools.  On WinXP the installers are pretty robust.  Perl,
ghostscript, and imagemagick are often used by tools (inkscape) other
than TeXLive.  Since the TeX community uses these apps on a variety of
platforms, TeX isn't as fussy as some other apps that expect a current
version of the tools.

The only serious project I've done on Win32 was a book originally
formatted with Y&Y plain tex.  Many of the figures weren't EPS files,
although they has .eps names.  It was easier to render then to PDF
than to make them into proper EPS.  As a result I've only viewed a few
.dvi files (but one was the comprehensive fonts document, which is my
fonts "stess" test).

--
George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia


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