[scribus] Ghostscript

[Gregory Pittman]

On 04/27/2011 10:36 AM, Louis Desjardins wrote:
> 2011/4/26 Gregory Pittman<gregp_ky at yahoo.com>
>
>> On 04/26/2011 03:21 AM, a.l.e wrote:
>>
>>> hi
>>>
>>>> First of all, you can ignore the message about not having
>>>>>>>> Ghostscript and use Scribus without any trouble. The only
>>>>>>>> thing is that you won't be able to create PDF files of your
>>>>>>>> documents. Since that's often important, it's worth getting
>>>>>>>> Ghostscript, but again, you can get to work in the meantime.
>>>>>>>> This isn't true, BTW. Ghostscript has nothing to do with
>>>>>>>> creating PDFs or even exporting as EPS.
>>>>>>>> I stand corrected.
>>>>>>>>
>>>>>>> That depends very much on what the content of the document is. In some
>>>> cases that is true.
>>>>
>>>
>>> well, i know it may sound picky, but i prefert to fix this thread,
>>> before somebody picks it up from the archive and gets a wrong advice:
>>>
>>> - ghostscript is not needed by scribus to create PDFs.
>>>
>>> - you can work with scribus without having to install ghostscript.
>>>
>>> - you only need ghostscript for some specific functions (print preview,
>>> ...) or to include specific type of content (loading a PDF or an EPS
>>> into an image frame, ...)
>>>
>>>
>>> so:
>>>
>>> - it's correct that you probably can start working with scribus without
>>> installing ghostscript
>>>
>>> - it's not correct that you need ghostscript to create PDFs
>>>
>>> - it's correct that you need ghostscript to include some types of
>>> contents (into your documents or PDFs)
>>>
>>>      -- when you are rasterizing a vector file into an image frame
>>
>
> Considering the confusion around Ghostscript would it be possible to modify
> the warning into something that would simply state that. Getting an error
> message on the first install of Scribus is not fun from the user
> perspective. It's not appealing, to say the least.
>
> This question is often raised. While we cannot control all the parameters
> when someone installs Scribus, we could at least mention what is important
> and what is not. I know we could put it in a readme file but a bit more
> verbose warning could well solve the issue.

In recent versions of Scribus, the warning includes a link that explains 
this pretty well, though perhaps there might be some clarification 
there. I'll work on something for the online manual about Ghostscript to 
add to help understanding of the issues.

Greg