General ⇒ Conversion from PS to PDF fails

[jeroens]

Hello LaTeX friends,

This is my first post in the community after having had much good help striving the forum. Please tell me if I forget including enough information.

Using MikTeX 2.9 in TeXnicCenter.

The problem: Converter ps2pdf did work properly until today. I had made a batch file for this converter, but executing it now, no PDF file is generated. Curiously, no error message is given as well.

Today, I made a build profile "LaTeX => DVI => PDF" according to a post by Thorsten, which doesn't generate a PDF as well. Please see the four attached files, with a very minimal working example and the build profile.

Code: Select all

\documentclass[12pt,a4paper]{article}

\begin{document}
Hello World
\end{document}

A PS file is generated, but the process is then terminated without error message.

How can I get my PDF file?

Thank you for your time and effort.

Kind regards,
Jeroen

[MartinC]

Are you sure the pdf is not created? What happens if you run ps2pdf from the command line?

[localghost]

[…] Today, I made a build profile "LaTeX => DVI => PDF" according to a post by Thorsten, which doesn't generate a PDF as well. […]

If I ever created such a profile (I don't remember), then for sure it does have nothing to do with the conversion from PS to PDF. I would have used dvipdfm(x) to create PDF from DVI directly (as dvips does for conversion from DVI to PS).

Note that ps2pdf needs Ghostscript installed. But this actually can't cause the problem since it worked already before.

But since your target format is PDF, why don't you just compile with PDFLaTeX (by the profile "LaTeX → PDF")?


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

[jeroens]

Are you sure the pdf is not created? What happens if you run ps2pdf from the command line?

I am sure the PDF is not created. If I execute ps2pdf in a folder where there is not a pdf yet, no pdf pops up. If I run it in a folder with already an old pdf, it is not updated.

If I run ps2pdf from the command line, it takes my batch-file (only one line), see attachment, gives no error, but it does not update my pdf file in the current directory.

[jeroens]

[…] Today, I made a build profile "LaTeX => DVI => PDF" according to a post by Thorsten, which doesn't generate a PDF as well. […]

If I ever created such a profile (I don't remember), then for sure it does have nothing to do with the conversion from PS to PDF. I would have used dvipdfm(x) to create PDF from DVI directly (as dvips does for conversion from DVI to PS).

Note that ps2pdf needs Ghostscript installed. But this actually can't cause the problem since it worked already before.

But since your target format is PDF, why don't you just compile with PDFLaTeX (by the profile "LaTeX → PDF")?


Best regards and welcome to the board
Thorsten

Hi Thorsten,

Thank you for your reply.

Maybe I got the profile from someone else, I do not remember it any more.

If I run dvipdfm, I have the same problem, see attachment. Everything seems to work fine, but my pdf file is not updated (as it used to be).

I do not use the profile "LaTeX -> PDF" because I have eps images in the 'real' document. So this would result in errors.

Still, I am desperate for a solution.

Kind regards,
Jeroen

[jeroens]

[...] I would have used dvipdfm(x) to create PDF from DVI directly [...]

Hi Thorsten,

Here an additional comment.

I just tried "LaTeX => DVI => PDF" with dvipdfm in TeXnicCenter. I then get a warning about 22 memory objects that are still allocated. It must have something to do with the images, because they miss its left side.

But at least, a pdf file is created now.

Please see the two attachments.

Kind regards,
Jeroen

[localghost]

[…] I do not use the profile "LaTeX -> PDF" because I have eps images in the 'real' document. So this would result in errors. […]

Native EPS files can be converted to PDF by the command line tool epstopdf or "on the fly" by the epstopdf package. TeX Live doesn't need the package. This would keep their properties as vector graphics. Conversion of bitmap files to EPS makes no sense because they won't become vector graphics. Other formats accepted by PDFLaTeX are JPG and PNG. With XeLaTeX you can include EPS, PDF, PNG and JPG files.

[jeroens]

[…] I do not use the profile "LaTeX -> PDF" because I have eps images in the 'real' document. So this would result in errors. […]

Native EPS files can be converted to PDF by the command line tool epstopdf or "on the fly" by the epstopdf package. [...]

Hi Thorsten,

Thank you for your explanation.

The inclusion of the epstopdf package has solved the problem in PDFLaTeX. It runs properly now and I obtain the desired PDF.

But still, I am wondering what is wrong with my ps2pdf converter...

Kind regards,
Jeroen

[MartinC]

But still, I am wondering what is wrong with my ps2pdf converter...

I guess you will have to reinstall to fix it.

[localghost]

[…] I guess you will have to reinstall to fix it.

Pressing Alt+F7 and starting the wizard to rebuild the output profiles should suffice.