[GRASS-dev] [GRASS GIS] #1554: wxGUI Cartographic Composer: preview broken on Windows

[GRASS GIS]

#1554: wxGUI Cartographic Composer: preview broken on Windows
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 Reporter:  martinl                                 |       Owner:  grass-dev@…              
     Type:  defect                                  |      Status:  new                      
 Priority:  critical                                |   Milestone:  6.4.3                    
Component:  wxGUI                                   |     Version:  unspecified              
 Keywords:  cartographic composer, psmap, wingrass  |    Platform:  MSWindows XP             
      Cpu:  Unspecified                             |  
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Comment(by hamish):

 Replying to [comment:33 annakrat]:
 > Replying to [comment:32 hamish]:
 > > just tested in a wingrass nightly build, preview fails with unable to
 > > find the ps2pdf program.
 >
 > Really preview? It fails when creating pdf file (Export to PDF).

 right. at creating the pdf, sorry.
 in the preview tab pressing the green '>' button makes a page, but it is
 all
 white except for the map box frame in the preview window. Saving to
 PostScript makes a nice file on the disk, all's correct there, just the
 preview image is missing.

 pressing the PDF button comes back with a pop-up window "ps2pdf exited
 with return code 1".

 > ps2pdf seems to be missing, we could add it there or maybe call gs
 directly?

 right, no ps2pdf in \extrabin.

 On Debian, ps2pdf comes with the ghostscript package, it's just a shell
 script which just calls:
 {{{
 ps2pdfwr -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4
 }}}

 And `ps2pdfwr` is another shell/wrapper script which calls `gs`. It boils
 down to:

 {{{
 gs -P- -dSAFER -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -q -P- -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH \
    -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sstdout=%stderr -sOutputFile=elevation.pdf \
    -P- -dSAFER -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -c .setpdfwrite -f \
    elevation.ps
 }}}

 just replace elevation.pdf and elevation.ps with %s, and `gs` for
 `gswin32c`.

 I was a little worried about the %stderr option, but I just tried the
 above on the wingrass dosbox command line and it worked! I've a nice pdf
 now.

 Perhaps hardcode the above long command into an if(wingrass) part of the
 composer code, or maybe cleaner to write a little ps2pdf.bat or ps2pdf.pyw
 (.pyw to avoid a dosbox popping up; we know python is there..) script to
 do it?


 minor cosmetics:
  * "Generating PostScript..." and "Generating PDF..." never go away after
 it's done. Can we clear the status bar after the file is closed?

  * I also notice when you add a mapframe with a raster in wingrass the
 text in the green rectangle on the draft mode page shows as "MAP
 FRAME[]raster: mapname"; the newline in the string is rendered as an
 unknown char instead of a newline.


 thanks,
 Hamish

-- 
Ticket URL: <https://trac.osgeo.org/grass/ticket/1554#comment:34>
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