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GSview*

One important thing to note is that GSview must not be confused with ghostview, gv and their derivatives! Although Adobe Reader® is often a better pure viewer for PDFs, GSview should be regarded as one of the most essential tools to have when using Scribus. GSview has some extremely useful functions. For those unfamiliar with the program, it provides an easy to use “front end†to Ghostscript, as well as pstoedit for converting bitmaps into vector files or vice versa. For those coming from a traditional DTP background in the Mac/Windows world, it also provides some of the functionality of Acrobat Distiller.

You should always use the latest version, at least 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 front end to Ghostscript’s less well known features such as image conversion and re-sampling. There are other features in Ghostscript, including: converting between TIFF formats, changing the color depth of a TIFF, JPEG or the color space of an image.

One example where GSview is extremely useful with Scribus is troubleshooting or fixing EPS files that 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 programs (like Scribus).

So, if you find difficulty with an EPS 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, by converting it to PNG or TIFF and then resize, adjust colors etc with an image program like GIMP or Krita.

Note that 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:

GSview is available for most Linux distributions, at least the major ones. Otherwise you can build GSview by following the instructions provided in the source package. For Windows and OS/2 and eComStation you can download conventional installers . Unfortunately, there is no current version for Mac OS X available.

A special note to users of OpenSUSE 11.3: The required GTK 1 libraries are no longer available for this Linux distribution, but you can use the versions compiled for 11.2. You need to install the gtk-1.20 and glib packages (if you want to build GSview yourself, you also need the respective devel RPMs), as well as the lang package.

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

*) Parts of this section are thanks to Russell Lang, author and maintainer of GSview, epstool and Ghostscript for his hints and patiently answering questions about GSview and Ghostscript.