fixing /invalidfont in ghostscript
Recently I updated ghostscript, and it stopped working even on its own examples:
$ pwd
/usr/share/ghostscript/8.15/examples
$ ps2pdf alphabet.ps ~/a.pdf
ERROR: /invalidfont in findfont
Operand stack:
(Palatino-Italic) Font (Palatino-Italic) 228176 (Palatino-
Italic) --nostringval-- (Palatino-Italic) URWPalladioL-Ital
Times-Italic NimbusRomNo9L-ReguItal
Execution stack:
...
It seems there is some problem with fonts and search path. Probably, something is updated in the algorithm. I didn’t have a lot of time to find what’s wrong, so I implemented a quick fix.
First I run:
strace -o ~/gvtr ps2pdf alphabet.ps ~/a.pdf
This command produced a trace file of executing “ps2pdf”. I searched for “pfb” (an extension for Type1 fonts), and the first match was “p052023l.pfb”. The program was unable to find this file. The file exists on the file system:
$ find /usr/share/fonts/ -name 'p052023l.pfb' /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1/p052023l.pfb
After thinking on the output from “gs -h”, the section “Search path”, I made a quick dirty fix, but it works for me:
# pwd /usr/share/ghostscript # ln -s /usr/share/fonts/default/Type1 fonts
April 15th, 2010 at 12:25 am
I was having this same problem, and tried your solution. Didn’t work, but it was a good suggestion.
In my case, I was trying to compile xtrans from the xorg GIT repo. It was failing because ghost-script was dying with the aforementioned error, so finally I just blanked out the Xtrans.mm file and everything compiled fine. No documentation, but I’m not a developer so I don’t really mind :)
> Xtrans.mm # Worked for me!