Postscript display problems

Question

I have a postscript image that was properly displayed in Windows with gsview, but when I view it in Ubuntu or Mac, I get only the second (last) page. I have tried a lot of applications(evince, Okular) and ways to properly open it but either the 1st or 2nd page will be displayed, the size is wrong and the page size tool is greyed out. When I convert it to pdf (ps2pdf) I get both pages but the size is still wrong. (In the properties it says that it is a US letter size). It is kind of enlarged. With psresize from letter to e.g. a5, it is only 'zoomed out' but still the same info is missing. Any ideas?

The files are uploaded here. Any advice is more than welcome.

Answer 1

Your PostScript program (not an image, an image in PostScript terms is a bitmap) does not include any media selection requests at all. In addition it is not a DSC compliant file, and does not contain any %%BoundingBox information.

So how do you expect the interpreter to know what size media the program requires ?

If it worked as you expected using GSView then you were simply lucky that the default media size happened to be compatible with what you expected.

You haven't stated here what media size you expect this to be on. Clearly you don't like US Letter, so maybe you expect A4. In which case you need to add something like:

<<
/PageSize [612 792]
>> setpagedevice

If you are running Ghostscript then you can use :

gs -sPAPERSIZE=A4 plot3

I imagine all the other applications you have tried will be running Ghostscript behind the scenes as there aren't very many open-source PostScript interpreters around. Quite why they would only be drawing one page I'm not sure, most likely they are running with something like -dNOPAUSE so that the first page is overwritten immediately by the second.

The missing media request is behind al your other problems, if the interpreter doesn't know how large the media has to be it can't possibly resize the content, etc.

Answer 2

It turns out that the image is properly displayed (not missing info) with the 10x14, tabloid or ledger size, that I unfortunately hadn't check with gv. I won't delete the post though, in case it could help someone.