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William Chia-Wei Cheng
(bill.cheng@acm.org)

Tgif FAQ - Problems Installing the LaTeX Equation Package

I followed the instructions in the LaTeX Equation Package on the Tgif Goodies Page and got all kinds of error. What's wrong?
If you are running gs5.10 and if you get pstoepsi.tar.Z from ftp.cs.ucla.edu or export.lcs.mit.edu as indicated in README.latex in the LaTeX Equation Package, you may have problems.

This is because pstoepsi.tar.Z is the ``orignal'' pstoepsi. I don't even know who wrote it originally. It only works with old versions of ghostscript.

Q: The Makefile for pbmtoepsi has the line: PBM_ROOT=/where_the_root_of_pbmplus_is but I've no idea what pbmplus is or where to find it.

Netpbm used to be known as pbmplus. Pbmplus doesn't come with pbmtoepsi. At the time the original pstoepsi was released, netpbm did not exist, so I guess the author gave the instruction mainly for pbmplus.

Netpbm-1mar1994 comes with pbmtoepsi. Therefore, if you have netpbm-1mar1994 and the shell script in the pstoepsi package, you don't need the rest of the files in the pstoepsi package. There are minor problems with netpbm-1mar1994 (such as missing symbolic links). So I made some minor changes and call it netpbm-15nov1997. On tgif's tools page, I have links to all of this. Basically, if you have gs5.10, you need to get netpbm-15nov1997, pstoepsi shell script, and make modifications to the shell script according to tgif's home page.

Q: The pstoepsi shell script itself seems to want a bunch of strange stuff. It wants some file called pstoppm.ps which I don't seem to have from my gs5.10 installation, but have from an old gs3.33 installation, so I set it to use that.

Gs5.10 doesn't have pstoppm.ps because it can generate ppm files all by itself! The old pstoepsi only knows about pstoppm.ps, so it can't work with gs5.10. If you get the pstoepsi shell script from tgif's home page, it will work with the new gs and without pstoppm.ps! In this case, it doesn't matter what you set PSTOPPM to.

Q: It wants to know the location of something called rasttopnm, which I've never heard of and don't seem to have. It doesn't seem to be trying to use this though.

It's not used in pstoepsi. In the original pstoepsi package, there's a program called pstorast which uses rasttopnm. Therefore, it doesn't matter what you set RASTTOPNM to.

Q: This is what happens when I run pstoepsi:

{bluemoon:william}[1] pstoepsi Tgifa00377.ps Tgifa00377.epsi
Usage: (file) ppmNrun
    converts file.ps to file.ppm (single page),
    or file.1ppm, file.2ppm, ... (multi page).
    N is # of bits per pixel (1, 8, or 24).
Examples: (golfer) ppm1run ..or.. (escher) ppm8run
Optional commands you can give first:
    horiz_DPI vert_DPI ppmsetdensity
    horiz_inches vert_inches ppmsetpagesize
    (dirname/) ppmsetprefix
    page_num ppmsetfirstpagenumber
GS>Writing Tgifa00377.ppm
Error: /undefined in writeppmfile
Operand stack:
    --nostringval-- --nostringval--
Execution stack:
...

The problem here is with "Error: /undefined in writeppmfile". Gs5.10 does not support "writeppmfile" any more. Since you are running the original pstoepsi which doesn't know about the new ghostscript, it won't work! The pstoepsi shell script on tgif's home page should work.