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

• Ghostview documentation
• 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 Redisplay buttons) with the mouse. Alternatively, the cursor arrow keys can be used.

Similarly, the mouse may be used to drag the file list up and down in the Open and Save dialogues.

How can I make even more room for the image?

Use the "spartan" style by starting gv with the command

    gv -style gv_spartan.dat

This removes the Open, Save, and Print buttons (they are still available from the File menu) 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 with options menu (State|Options ...), and can be made default by selecting Save. 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 used to save the contents of the window when it's not currently displayed: backing store or backing pixmap. Some X-servers seem to support only backing store (eg. VAXstations) and some only backing pixmap (eg. some X-terminals, including EWS).

On VMS, the default may be changed by creating a file called GV.DAT with the following line (or, if the file already exists, add the line)

    GV*Ghostview.UseBackingPixmap: False

This file should be placed in your home directory (ie. 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.

UseBackingPixmap is true by default (so as to work on X-terminals), so should be defined as false if, eg., a VAXstation display is used.

On Unix, the definition should go in ~/.gv .

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. On VMS, to fix this you need to create a file called GHOSTSCRIPT.DAT with the following line

    Ghostscript*useXPutImage: false

Again, this file 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.

On Unix, put the above line into a file called ~/Ghostscript .

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).