GV Frequently Asked Questions gv 3.5
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Contents
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o What happened to the scroll bars?
o How can I make even more room for the image?
o Small characters aren't very clear (eg. compared to xdvi).
o When the display is obscured (eg. by another window) and then brought
back into view, the output is not refreshed automatically.
o Characters are displayed in unreadable reverse-video or as black or
white rectangles.
o When I start VMS Ghostscript I get the message "Cannot get Window from
ghostview" and then Ghostscript exits.
Additional Sources of Information
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o gv Home Page http://wwwthep.physik.uni-mainz.de/~plass/gv/
o Ghostscript Home Page http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.html
o gv documentation http://wwwthep.physik.uni-mainz.de/~plass/gv/gv_doc/gv.html
FAQ
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What happened to the scroll bars?
They have been removed in order to make more room for the image. The
displayed portion of the image may be moved by dragging the image or
the paner (panel between the "Save Marked" and << >> buttons) with the
mouse. Alternatively, the cursor arrow keys can be used.
How can I make even more room for the image?
Use the "spartan" style by starting gv with the command
gv -spartan
This removes the "Open", "Print", "Save", "Redisplay", and page marking
buttons (they are still available from the "File" and "Page" menus) and
replaces them with the document attribute controls, which are normally
along the top.
Small characters aren't very clear (eg. compared to xdvi).
Antialiasing can improve the display of bitmapped fonts (eg. from TeX)
when displayed on a colour or greyscale screen. The same technique is
used by xdvi. Note that antialiasing requires at least Ghostscript
version 4.x.
Antialiasing can be turned on from the "State" menu, and can be made
default by saving the setting in "State | gv Options...". It is not on by
default because it's slower.
When the display is obscured (eg. by another window) and then brought back
into view, the output is not refreshed automatically (but the "Refresh" button
does work).
There are two methods that can be used to save the contents of the
window when it's not currently displayed: backing store and backing
pixmap. Some X-servers seem to support only backing store (eg.
VAXstations) and some only backing pixmap (eg. some X-terminals,
including EWS).
In order to force gv to use one method or the other, use the
"State | Setup Options ..." menu and toggle the "Backing Pixmap" button.
When selected/highlighted (normally the default), gv will use backing
pixmap; otherwise it will use backing store. Select "Apply" to use a new
setting and "Save" to make it the new default.
Characters are displayed in unreadable reverse-video or as black or white
rectangles.
This occurs on EWS X-terminals, which do not implement bitmap/pixmap
displaying properly. To fix this you need a Ghostscript resource file
containing the following line
Ghostscript*useXPutImage: false
On Unix, put the above line into a file called ~/Ghostscript .
On VMS, it should go into GHOSTSCRIPT.DAT, which should be placed in
your home directory (i.e. where you find yourself immediately after
logging in) unless you have redefined the logical name
DECW$USER_DEFAULTS, in which case it should go in the directory
specified by this logical name.
When I start VMS Ghostscript I get the message "Cannot get Window from
ghostview" and then Ghostscript exits.
Ghostscript reserves the environment variable GHOSTVIEW (logical name
or DCL symbol on VMS) for internal use, so it should not be used for
other purposes (eg. as a VMS command symbol for this program; use GV
instead).
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Last modified: 10th June 1997 (gv 3.5.3).
Tim Adye, <T.J.Adye@rl.ac.uk>