[tex-live] [Bug Report]Texlive: when including EPS, latex provide a dvi with blank frame instead of figure

[Zdenek Wagner]

2008/2/13, George N. White III <gnwiii at gmail.com>:
> On 2/12/08, Jiang Liu <jliupku at gmail.com> wrote:
> > Hi,
> > I installed texlive-full on my Ubuntu 7.10 by apt-get.
> > When I try to include an eps file, after latex the .tex file, the
> > resulting dvi shows only a blank frame for the figure.
>
> Your test.dvi look fine on my Fedora 8 texlive system using
>  xdvi (from RH's tetex package as well as the texlive svn version)
> and kdvi.   In general, converting figures to pdf and using
> pdf(la)tex is less fragile,
> so unless you really need .dvi and enjoy debugging other people's code, it
> may not be worth the effort to track down the problem on
> your system.  Pdf is used by a much larger
> community than
>  dvi, so pdf tools tend to be better tested than the
> tools that are specific
> to TeX dvi format.
>
I would not say that dvi tools are not well tested. The true reason is
that dvi viewers display dvi files, not eps files. Some support for
eps was introduced to some viewers but they need cooperation with
other tools (ghostscript). No support for eps in some particular dvin
viewer can just be more than expected. On the other hand, the
situation with pdf tools is not much better. I reported two bugs in
Acrobat Reader, one in January 2004, another in March 2004. They have
not been fixed yet. I know about a few more bugs but it seems that
reporting bugs to Adobe makes no sense. I have also reported pdf
related bug in ghostscript and it was fixed very quickly.

> > But when I transform the .eps file to a PDF file and pdflatex the .tex
> > file, the output is ok.
> >
> > The attached is the tex file, eps file I used and files produced by
> > latex test
>
> It is nice to see a proper problem report with the test files.   Since the
>  .eps file is rendered by ghostscript, one has to consider a) bad eps, or
> b) a buggy ghostscript version.   "epstool --test-eps" didn't find any
> problems with test.eps, and the fact that you can convert test.eps to
>  pdf suggests that your ghostscript can render the file.
> What does "xdvi -debug 32 test.dvi" give?
>
> > And below are the texlive components in my machine (by dpkg -l | grep
> > texlive)
>
>
> --
> George N. White III <aa056 at chebucto.ns.ca>
>  Head of St. Margarets Bay, Nova Scotia


-- 
Zdeněk Wagner
http://hroch486.icpf.cas.cz/wagner/
http://icebearsoft.euweb.cz