Bug 162897

Summary: ps2pdf Unrecoverable error
Product: [Fedora] Fedora Reporter: John Reiser <jreiser>
Component: ghostscriptAssignee: Tim Waugh <twaugh>
Status: CLOSED NOTABUG QA Contact: Mike McLean <mikem>
Severity: medium Docs Contact:
Priority: medium    
Version: 4   
Target Milestone: ---   
Target Release: ---   
Hardware: i386   
OS: Linux   
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Fixed In Version: Doc Type: Bug Fix
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Last Closed: 2005-07-11 16:00:40 UTC Type: ---
Regression: --- Mount Type: ---
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oVirt Team: --- RHEL 7.3 requirements from Atomic Host:
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PostScript input file 1.6KB none

Description John Reiser 2005-07-11 14:59:22 UTC 
From Bugzilla Helper:
User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.7.8) Gecko/20050524 Fedora/1.0.4-4 Firefox/1.0.4

Description of problem:
ps2pdf fails to convert this simple input which produces one page with 4 copies of the C,D scales of a sliderule.

Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable):
ghostscript-7.07-40

How reproducible:
Always

Steps to Reproduce:
1. ps2pdf --verbose sliderule.ps >/tmp/foo.pdf
2.
3.
  

Actual Results:  $ ps2pdf --verbose sliderule.ps >/tmp/foo.pdf
GNU Ghostscript 7.07: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
$ 


Expected Results:  Generate /tmp/foo.pdf

Additional info:

A careful reading of "man ps2pdf" suggests that the commandline syntax should be
"ps2pdf sliderule.ps - >/tmp/foo.pdf".  If so, then the actual behavior "Unrecoverable error" is a gross usability bug because the message is not related to the error, and gives the user no clue as to what to change in order to obtain the obviously-desired functionality.  A message such as "ps2pdf requires exactly two [non-optional] commandline arguments" is required.
Comment 1 John Reiser 2005-07-11 15:00:52 UTC 
Created attachment 116604 [details]
PostScript input file 1.6KB
Comment 2 Tim Waugh 2005-07-11 15:15:36 UTC 
There is no such option '--verbose'.
Comment 3 John Reiser 2005-07-11 15:51:35 UTC 
Yes there is such an option '--verbose'.  This transcript shows that --verbose
exists, and its use alters the behavior of ps2pdf, mostly in an expected way. 
--verbose gives a diagnostic message on stderr instead of just an exit status
code.  --verbose also changes the exit code from fail [1] to success [0], while
the usually-expected behavior would be to leave the exit code the same.
-----
$ ps2pdf sliderule.ps >/tmp/foo.pdf
$ echo $?
1  ## ps2pdf failed
$ ps2pdf --verbose sliderule.ps >/tmp/foo.pdf
GNU Ghostscript 7.07: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1
$ echo $?
0  ## ps2pdf "succeeded"
$ ls -l /tmp/foo.pdf
-rw-rw-r--  1 jreiser jreiser 50 Jul 11 08:40 /tmp/foo.pdf
$ cat /tmp/foo.pdf   ## intended output is ghostscript error traceback
Copyright (C) 2003 artofcode LLC, Benicia, CA.  All rights reserved.
This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.
Error: /undefinedfilename in (-q)
Operand stack:

Execution stack:
   %interp_exit   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--  
--nostringval--   2   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   --nostringval--  
--nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   --nostringval--
Dictionary stack:
   --dict:1058/1123(ro)(G)--   --dict:0/20(G)--   --dict:69/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: 2
$ 
-----

Please re-open this bug.
Comment 4 Tim Waugh 2005-07-11 16:00:40 UTC 
No, there is no such option as '--verbose'.  You are using ps2pdf incorrectly.