7. GV Frequently Asked Questions

Contents

• What happened to the scroll bars?
• How can I make even more room for the image?
• Small characters aren't very clear (eg. compared to xdvi).
• When the display is obscured (eg. by another window) and then brought back into view, the output is not refreshed automatically.
• Characters are displayed in unreadable reverse-video or as black or white rectangles.
• When I start VMS Ghostscript I get the message "Cannot get Window from ghostview" and then Ghostscript exits.

Additional Sources of Information

• gv documentation
• gv Home Page
• Ghostscript Home Page

FAQ

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).