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GSView and Scribus

Although Acrobat Reader® is in my experience, sometimes a better pure viewer for PDF, I also consider GSView one of the essential tools to have when using Scribus. GSView has a handful of extremely useful functions. For those unfamiliar, it provides an easy to use "front end" to Ghostscript. For those coming from the Windows/Mac world, it also has the functionality of Distiller with a graphical front end for those applications which do not export PDF natively.

First, make sure you have the latest version 4.4. (GsView migrated from the Windows world, where it has been excellent since the 4.x versions.) For using with Scribus, it has the following features:

One example where I use GSView with Scribus is for troubleshooting/fixing EPS files which do not display correctly within Scribus. Although many applications can generate EPS files, some add their own quirks into the EPS, which can cause problems when used in other applications (like Scribus).

So, if you find difficulty with an EPS you wish to use in Scribus, open the EPS in GSView. Then, use the key command M to display messages from Ghostscript. The messages can indicate problems which cause display or printing errors. You can also use the epswrite "device" to resave the EPS, which can help to strip out or fix issues with an EPS.

You can also rasterize an image like this, by converting to PNG or TIFF and then resize, adjust colors etc with an image progrgam like GIMP or Corel Photoshop. I did this with a troublesome EPS and converted it to a 600 dpi PNG, which would then display and print perfectly from Scribus. Sometimes when working with images and DTP there are several different ways to accomplish the same task - in my example, it was getting a complex EPS file from Illustrator to display and print properly from Scribus. The fact that there problem displaying the EPS, was not a bug in Scribus, but some non-standard postscript info in the file, which by using Ghostscript as a back end to GSView I could strip out and then display properly in Scribus.



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