Ex Bibliotheca

The life and times of Zack Weinberg.

Sunday, 28 November 2004

# 4:10 AM

I would like to know precisely what is the difference between normal Ghostscript and ESP Ghostscript.

To be somewhat more specific, I would like to know exactly what it is about normal Ghostscript that causes cupsd to emit the following error message:

E [27/Nov/2004:23:13:11 -0800] Unable to convert file 0 to printable format for
job 1!
I [27/Nov/2004:23:13:11 -0800] Hint: Do you have ESP Ghostscript installed?
I [27/Nov/2004:23:13:11 -0800] Hint: Try setting the LogLevel to "debug".

I tried setting the LogLevel to "debug" and got no additional information. I also tried running the daemon under strace, which revealed that it makes no attempt to do anything with the print job before issuing the aforementioned error. I can only conclude that when the daemon started it somehow probed Ghostscript, determined that it was the wrong kind, and decided not to even bother trying to use it.

This is doubly silly because, as the daemon bloody well should be aware, my printer is perfectly capable of interpreting Postscript itself, so when I try to print a file which is already in that format, it should be able to do the moral equivalent of "cat > /dev/usb/lp0" and be done with it. I know very well that that works, because that's how I have to print stuff right now. Grrraaaaaah.