Ghostview Frequently Asked Questions                                   gv 3.1
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Contents
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o    What happened to the scroll bars?
o    How can I make even more room for the image?
o    Small characters aren't very clear (eg. compared to xdvi).
o    When the display is obscured (eg. by another window) and then brought
     back into view, the output is not refreshed automatically.
o    Characters are displayed in unreadable reverse-video or as black or
     white rectangles.
o    When I start VMS Ghostscript I get the message "Cannot get Window from
     ghostview" and then ghostscript exits.


FAQ
===

What happened to the scroll bars?

     They have been removed in order to make more room for the image. The
     displayed portion of the image may be moved by dragging the image or
     the paner (panel between the "Save Marked" and "Redisplay" buttons) with
     the mouse. Alternatively, the cursor arrow keys can be used.

     Similarly, the mouse may be used to drag the file list up and down in
     the "Open" and "Save" dialogues.

How can I make even more room for the image?

     Use the "spartan" style by starting gv with the command

         gv -style gv_spartan.dat

     This removes the "Open", "Save", and "Print" buttons (they are still
     available from the "File" menu) and replaces them with the document
     attribute controls, which are normally along the top.

Small characters aren't very clear (eg. compared to xdvi).

     Antialiasing can improve the display of bitmapped fonts (eg. from TeX)
     when displayed on a colour or greyscale screen. The same technique is
     used by xdvi. Note that antialiasing requires at least ghostscript 
     version 4.x.

     Antialiasing can be turned on with options menu ("State"|"Options ..."),
     and can be made default by selecting "Save". It is not on by default 
     because it's slower.

When the display is obscured (eg. by another window) and then brought back
into view, the output is not refreshed automatically (but the "Refresh" button
does work).

     There are two methods used to save the contents of the window when it's
     not currently displayed: backing store or backing pixmap. Some
     X-servers seem to support only backing store (eg. VAXstations) and some
     only backing pixmap (eg. some X-terminals, including EWS).

     On VMS, the default may be changed by creating a file called GV.DAT
     with the following line (or, if the file already exists, add the line)

         GV*Ghostview.UseBackingPixmap: False

     This file should be placed in your home directory (ie. where you find
     yourself immediately after logging in) UNLESS you have redefined the
     logical name DECW$USER_DEFAULTS, in which case it should go in the
     directory specified by this logical name.

     UseBackingPixmap is true by default (so as to work on X-terminals), so
     should be defined as false if, eg., a VAXstation display is used.

     On Unix, the definition should go in ~/.gv .

Characters are displayed in unreadable reverse-video or as black or white
rectangles.

     This occurs on EWS X-terminals, which do not implement bitmap/pixmap
     displaying properly. On VMS, to fix this you need to create a file
     called GHOSTSCRIPT.DAT with the following line

         Ghostscript*useXPutImage: false

     Again, this file should be placed in your home directory (i.e. where
     you find yourself immediately after logging in) UNLESS you have
     redefined the logical name DECW$USER_DEFAULTS, in which case it should
     go in the directory specified by this logical name.

     On Unix, put the above line into a file called ~/Ghostscript .

When I start VMS Ghostscript I get the message "Cannot get Window from
ghostview" and then ghostscript exits.

     Ghostscript reserves the environment variable GHOSTVIEW (logical name
     or DCL symbol on VMS) for internal use, so it should not be used for
     other purposes (eg. as a VMS command symbol for this program; use GV
     instead).

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First created: 20th January 1997 (gv 2.7.6) by
Tim Adye, <T.J.Adye@rl.ac.uk>
