Viewing textures; lout-3.28.user.ps conversion issues

[K. H. Man]

Hi everyone,

This is my first posting; I am working on some documentation for 
Lua. It was a nightmare trying to dig into TeX innards (I'm no 
admirer of some of Knuth's eccentricities :-)), but Lout is a 
pleasure to use and tweak. Two thumbs up!!

Here is some information on the two issues mentioned. I could not 
find any information about them in the mailing lists, so I took a 
stab at finding the problem:

(1)
On Ghostview 4.3 and AFPL Ghostscript 7.04 on Win32, textures did 
not render in the screen display. Printing is OK. However, 
textures does appear if I set Media->Display Settings...->Depth to 
1 bits/pixel or 4 bits/pixel. Textures does not appear on other 
such settings.

There isn't enough information in the Ghostview 4.3 documentation 
to find out the reason for the glitch. I guess the sources will 
have to be consulted.

(2)
lout-3.28.user.ps dies while being converted to PDF using 
Ghostview 4.3 and Ghostscript 7.04 on Win32. The exact location is 
here: rendering the textured letters -- '3725 7355(ABC)m' right 
after the 45deg texture creation code on Page 160.

The error message is:
---------------------------------------
Unrecoverable error: rangecheck in show
Operand stack:
    ABC
gsapi_execute_cont returns -15
gsapi_exit returns 0
---------------------------------------

The horizontal striped texture creation went fine. Tweaking the 
settings -- '2 1 1 45 dg 1 pt 3 pt' I found that the rotate 
parameter '45 dg' causes Ghostscript to 'give up the ghost' :-), 
so to speak. :-) Changing the other parms did not cause any error.

Rendering a slanted texture using a @Box (giving LoutBox) was OK, 
the PDF conversion was successful. It is only rendering of glyphs, 
such as using the show operator in m. I think Ghostscript 7.04 may 
have a problem rendering glyphs with a pattern. Changing 
CompatibilityLevel does not make a difference. Dunno about the 
behaviour of the latest non-AFPL version. Will report later.

(3)
Also, I have compiled Lout 3.28 on DJGPP 3.2.2, all the documents 
can be processed properly except the user manual. It causes a 
reboot (!) or it hangs around here:
all[45]->dig[56]:@Include { dia_synt }
I think I will try to isolate this first. Will report later.

--
Cheers,
Kein-Hong Man (esq.)
Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia... fiddling with Open Source,
bits and pieces at http://www.geocities.com/keinhong/
-----------------------------------------------------
"It's GNU/Linux dammit!" - RMS
RMS turns 50 on March 16 2003, Happy birthday RMS!!!