[texhax] gv maintainer volunteer?

Karl Berry karl at freefriends.org
Fri Oct 10 10:33:11 CEST 2003


GV, the PostScript/PDF previewer based on Ghostscript, hasn't been
actively maintained for a number of years.  I've written to the previous
maintainer, Johannes Plass, and he confirmed that he simply has no time
to work on it any more.  (Although he's happy to help with questions as
needed.)

So, would anyone here be interested in taking that job on?  Although
there is another pdf previewer (http://www.foolabs.com/xpdf), it is an
independent implementation from scratch.  Both this approach and the
Ghostscript-based approach have their pros and cons, and it's nice to
have both.

We'd like to include binaries for gv in TeX Live as well, since it (or
xpdf) is a critical part of the edit-compile-preview cycle when using
pdf.  But the sources are too stale to attempt this now.

I have a list of assorted bugs and wishlist items that I've noticed
myself, to get things started :).  Also, just making a new release with
updated documentation and framework files would be helpful, since it's
been so many years.

We can provide ftp/http space on tug.org if desired, or perhaps the
sources could be kept at savannah.gnu.org, berlios.de, or another
hosting service.

If you're interested, please let me know.

Thanks,
karl


P.S. Of course there's also Adobe Reader nee Acrobat for reading PDF,
but since that's not freely redistributable, we can't include it on
CTAN, TeX Live, etc., aside from any philosophical preferences some
people (including me :) have.


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