Re: Strange printing problem

[Nikola Lecic <nikola.lecic%anthesphoria.net@localhost>]

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On Thu, 14 Feb 2008 01:06:22 -0500
David Holland <dholland+netbsd%eecs.harvard.edu@localhost> wrote:
 
> On Wed, Feb 13, 2008 at 09:36:13PM -0800, Paul Goyette wrote:
>  > If I print a file from (for example) xv, instead of printing the
>  > file's contents I get a single line that says
>  > 
>  >    **** Unable to open the initial device, quitting.
>  > 
>  > That error message doesn't seem to appear anywhere in magicfilter
>  > or lpd.
> 
> It is in ghostscript. Dunno what causes it though.

- From ghostscript-gpl's doc/Issues.htm:

  When pdfwrite device cannot open the output file it fails with:
    **** Unable to open the initial device, quitting.

(Device here means gs's option -sDEVICE=[...].)

So you can easily reproduce that error by invoking e.g. ps2pdf or
pdf2ps from a non-writable directory. Or try not to specify
- -sOutputFile, like this:

  % gs -sDEVICE=pswrite abc.pdf (even in a writable directory)
  % gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite abc.ps

and you will get the same error. Finally, you can try

  % gs -sDEVICE=pswrite -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH \
       -sOutputFile=/writable-dir/abc.ps abc.pdf

and check if gs is able to write its temporary file.

Possible workaround: try to set TEMP and/or TMPDIR to something
writable (e.g. /tmp) in your environment.

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