Re: How to avoid ps2pdf

[Laura Conrad]

>>>>> "Thomas" == Thomas Willhalm <address@hidden> writes:
 
    >> I know there are lots of ways to get pdf out of TeX; is anyone here
    >> using one with lilypond and latex that doesn't involve ps2pdf?

    Thomas> The best tool I know to produce pdf is pdflatex. That's why I 
modified
    Thomas> lilypond-book to use pdflatex. However, I consider this version in 
alpha
    Thomas> or beta state at most. I have sent a patch to the developer list:
    Thomas> 
http://mail.gnu.org/pipermail/lilypond-devel/2002-February/000442.html
    Thomas> If you like, I can send you the file via private mail.

Thanks, I'll check it out later.

    Thomas> So far, I'm using it successfully to produce a booklet of songs.
    Thomas> With the hyperref package I get a nice clickable table of
    Thomas> contents.

That would be a good thing.

    Thomas> I haven't seen any floating note heads, but I don't use advanced 
features
    Thomas> of lilypond.

I sometimes do, but not in the case of these particular notes.

>>>>> "Mats" == Mats Bengtsson <address@hidden> writes:

    Mats> It sounds as if the ghostscript version on your machine is broken.
    Mats> What does version number does 'gs -v' report?

address@hidden book]$ gs -v
GNU Ghostscript 6.53 (2002-02-05)
Copyright (C) 2002 artofcode LLC, Benicia, CA.  All rights reserved.

    Mats> The easiest solution for you may be to install another ghostscript
    Mats> version, 6.5x works well for me.

The one on Mandrake 8.1 worked for me, too, but this one has problems.

>>>>> "Erik" == Erik Sandberg <address@hidden> writes:
    Erik> I have experienced very similar problems with Debian's
    Erik> ps2pdf package. I found one workaround:

    Erik> Before running ps2pdf, run ps2ps on the postscript file, like

    Erik> ps2ps music.ps temp.ps

    Erik> This produces a new postscript file temp.ps which is not identical to 
    Erik> music.ps, but which ps2pdf seems to like better: If you now use 
ps2pdf on 
    Erik> temp.ps, you will probably avoid those errors.

Thanks, this seems to do the trick.  I'm glad to know it's a
ghostscript problem, not introduced by Mandrake.

And then Mats wrote:

    Mats> I wouldn't recommend this method in general since the resulting 
    Mats> files will be significantly larger. The reason is that in the
    Mats> output from ps2ps, everything is produced using low-level Postscript
    Mats> drawing commands. Instead of typesetting a font symbol by specifying
    Mats> the font name and the character code, the postscript code draws the
    Mats> symbol using lines, spline curves and so on.

OK, I will install a ghostscript fix as soon as I find one, but I
don't think I'm expert enough to go back to an older version of
ghostscript given all the dependencies.  

-- 
Laura (mailto:address@hidden , http://www.laymusic.org/ )
(617) 661-8097  fax: (801) 365-6574 
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