Re: [MiKTeX] Problems with Yap

[<gn...@gm...>]

On 11/30/06, Stefan Schulz <ste...@tu...> wrote:
> Hello!
> I have big problems with miktex2.5 and yap. After conversion from miktex2.4 to miktex2.5
> yap often complained about eps files within the latex document, which was not the case with
> yap2.4. After fiddling around for some time, I decided to totally reinstall miktex. So I
> downloaded the basic installer. Now yap complains even if there is no eps file included.
> Furthermore, the pop-up messages showing the error posted below, can be clicked away but
> keep coming again, so that I have to interrupt yap manually.
>
> Who has some advice?

The release notes explain the changes in YAP.  There were some
configuration glitches that affected files that use the Adobe
"laserwriter 35" fonts.  MikTeX includes a version of ghostscript that
used to render EPS files.  To render the Adobe fonts, Ghostscript uses
the free URW fonts, which it locates using a Fontmap file.  The
confusion stems from the fact that there is an obsolete urwfonts
package and also a set of new packages, one for each font.  The
original MikTeX 2.5 provided a Fontmap file that referred to the
obsolete package, while recent updates point to the locations of the
new packages.  Just to add to the confusion, MikTeX's mgs would use
the Fontmap files from C:\gs if ghostscript was already installed in
that location. There have been numerous posts analyzing the problem.
If you need more details, check the archives.

You should note that the new yap will have problems if your EPS files
contain errors -- a number of people have somehow managed to use bogus
"EPS" files in MikTeX 2.4 and found that the new rendering method is
not as forgiving.

If you are stuck with a bunch of .eps files that don't work, one
option is to convert them to pdf and use pdf(la)tex.  Epstopdf and
similar tools will often produce correct pdf from files that can't be
used reliably as .eps.  How do I know this? A colleague's book project
had .eps files that his summer student had created by using "print to
disk" and then editing the bounding box manually to "place" them in
the documents.  The resulting bounding box entries were not correct,
and the files contained printer-specific commands and could not be
rendered on other devices.  To make the files usable, I had to fix the
bounding boxes and convert to pdf.  I could have produced correct .eps
from the .pdf files, but since the publisher wanted a .pdf file, it
was simpler to use pdftex.

-- 
George N. White III <aa...@ch...>
Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia