[tex-live] dvips cannot find figures (again)

John Murdie john at cs.york.ac.uk
Tue Jan 31 18:15:12 CET 2006


I see that the new version of dvips(1) provided with TeXLive 2005 has
been configured with 'z1' (security on) in config.ps by default - i.e.
it will reject attempts to reference files by absolute pathnames, and
the use of Unix commands in \specials. Alas, the error messages the end
user sees aren't clear, and have caused panic here among those who did
not read the TeXLive documentation!

Rather than the message:

dvips: Could not find figure file /usr/john/elephant.eps; continuing

wouldn't something like:

dvips: Refusing to read figure file /usr/john/elephant.eps on security grounds - use option -R0 to override; continuing

be more informative - and ditto with similar messages?

I know that this is a dvips matter I should raise with the author, but I
feel that the TeXLive developers should have something to say about
this.

John A. Murdie
Department of Computer Science
University of York
UK



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