[KLUG Members] text2pdf WAS :no subject

[Adam Tauno Williams]

> > > Googling has turned up help for problems with "Error: /invalidfont in
> > > /findfont", but those fixes don't help me.  Ghostscript should be able
> > > to find all the fonts it needs, all of it's paths are correct and I
> > > can find the files it would be trying to find within them.
> > Do you actually see /invalid font errors?  Have you scanned your
> > test documents for high order and weird low order ASCII characters?
> looking through the files themselves [less] I couldn't see anything
> out of the ordinary.  I know the .txt is clean, the .ps I just scaned,
> but it looks clean. The PDF is mostly empty, but it does contain
> non-printing ascii.

PDFs will contain non-printables, that is normal.  PDFs can contain both
encoded and compresses data.

> And yeah, the actual output of ps2pdf give me this line:
> Error: /invalidfont in --show--
> I have re-compiled [ala gentoo and emerge] ghost-script, a2ps, and all
> my fonts, to no avail.

Try something really straight forward like:
ls -l | a2ps -q -o- | ps2pdf - ls.pdf

If that fails your installation is broken.  

Recompiling won't help a broken configuration, which is almost certainly
what "/invalidfont in --show--" means.  Ghostscript configuration is
strictly for level 12 warlocks and higher,  and even they approach it
with trepidation.  I'd suggest looking around for some packages that are
compatible with Gentoo (if such a things exist).

<aside>Honestly, this whole download and compile everything is really
utter madness,  your far more likely to introduce problems than avoid
them.  Other than stess-testing your backplane all this compiling buys
no measurable performance benefit (unless your on a 64bit box and
avoiding thunked 32bit code), and potentially could even be working the
other way.</aside>