GSview and Scribus

Parts of this section are thanks to Russell Lang, author and maintainer of GSview, epstool and Ghostscript for his hints and patiently answering my questions about GSview and Ghostscript. It has allowed the Scribus Team to use some of the more advanced features of Ghostscript in Scribus.

First off, It is in my very strong opinion, a superior replacement for ghostview, gv and derivatives. Although Acrobat Reader® is in my experience sometimes a better pure viewer for PDF, I also consider GSview one of the most 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, as well as pstoedit for converting bitmaps into vector files. 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.

Second ensure you have the latest version 4.7+. (GSview migrated from the Windows world, where it has been excellent since the 4.x versions.)

For use with Scribus, GSview has the following features:

• With the help of pstoedit, you can convert bitmap images or PDF content back into SVG and other scalable vector file formats.
• The ability to preview, convert and add previews (Tiff recommended) for raw EPS (Encapsulated PostScript Files).
• The ability to extract text from a PDF.
• The ability to preview, convert and add previews for raw PostScript files. An easy to use interface for creating PDF's in applications without the high level of export capabilities of Scribus. (You are still recommended to use the Export to PDF Scribus, as it is optimized for Scribus files.)
• As an easy to use front end to Ghostscript's less well known features such as image conversion and re-sampling. The example below uses the epswrite "device". There are others in Ghostscript including: converting between TIFF formats, changing the color depth of at TIFF, JPEG or the color space of an image.

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 or PDF 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 re-save the EPS, which can help to strip out or fix issues with an EPS.

You can also rasterize an EPS image like this, by converting to PNG or TIFF and then resize, adjust colors etc with an image program like GIMP or Corel Photoshop. I did this with a troublesome EPS and converted it to a 600DPI 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.

Note: GSview uses the libgs.so shared library to access Ghostscript. Not all Linux distributions ship this, so the hints for compiling Ghostscript with a paralell install really apply here.

Getting Gsview:

Not all Linux distributions offer GSview. However, for those with rpm based systems, a simple rpm command will have you with an easy to install rpm. The GSview tarball already has a built-in spec file. A simple:

rpmbuild -tb ./gsview-4.7.tar.gz

Will get you started. Windows has a convetional setup.exe installer. Unfortunately, it is not yet available for MacOSX.

GSview since about 4.3, has been, in my experience, the most reliable and versatile PDF viewer along with Acrobat Reader on Linux. For DTP with Scribus, I consider it essential.

Now, for advanced hints with GSview and Ghostscript, see: Advanced Ghostscript and GSview Hints