[gentoo-amd64] Ghostscript Problem - Need Verification

[Frank Peters <frank.peters@comcast.net>]

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I have noticed a severe problem with ghostscript.  A bug report was filed
with the ghostscript upstream maintainers, but, surprisingly (to me at least)
no one could reproduce the problem.  This may indicate that the problem is
unique to Gentoo ghostscript or that something strange is happening in my
system.  What I need is verification from other Gentoo users.

The problem concerns the ghostscript raster drivers such as PGM, TIFF, PNG,
etc.  Whenever a certain resolution (the exact value depends on the driver)
is exceeded, the output for any embedded images in the PostScript file is all
black.  Text is rendered without problem, but if an image is inserted into
the document, say with OpenOffice, the image is rendered all black (above certain
resolutions).

Why do I use these raster drivers?

There can be a need to use them on occasion, but, more significantly, I print
documents with the ghostscript IJS driver from Hewlett-Packard.  Ghostscript must
supply some kind of raster to the IJS driver because any embedded images are printed
all black.  The problem therefore probably extends beyond the raster drivers
themselves.

Attached is a sample PostScript file, image-test.ps.  With a PostScript viewer
such as gv or gsview, the image is clearly visible.  If some Gentoo user could
render this file into a PGM format using the following command and then report the
results, it would be very helpful to me.

gs -dSAFER -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pgm -r380 -sOutputFile=image-test.pgm image.ps

Viewing the resulting image file with an image viewer such as display from ImageMagick
(display -resize 25% image-test.pgm) should show an all white page with an all black
rectangle in place of the central image.

Interestingly, if the resolution in the above command is changed to 300dpi (-r300)
the raster driver renders the image correctly. I found the exact cut-off value
to be 326.

The same behavior applies to the TIFF and PNG drivers although at different
cut-off resolution values for each driver. However, the fax drivers, tiffg3,
and the pbm driver seem unaffected.

If someone can verify this problem, then Gentoo ghostscript must be the fault.
If no one else can reproduce the issue then I am somehow in possession of a
jinxed system (although the same problem exists on both of my Gentoo machines).

Frank Peters

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