ghostview no longer works after homebrew upgrade of ghostscript

Question

I recently did an update/upgrade with homebrew, and now gv no longer opens any of my .ps files. The Ghostscript error window that comes up says "Unknown device: x11 Error: PostScript interpreter failed in main window".

If I try gs --help, it doesn't list x11 under available devices, and the Default output device is "bbox". I tried uninstalling and reinstalling through homebrew. I tried to reinstall adding "--with-x11" but that throws the error "invalid option: --with-x11" - apparently that's no longer allowed. I've upgraded my command line code through the app store, and tried all of this again - nothing changed. I'm on High Sierra 10.13.3, using Homebrew 2.0.6, ghostscript 9.26_1, and gv 3.7.4.

Answer 1

For those searching for a solution, I've put together a custom Homebrew tap that allows you to easily install GV (commonly called Ghostview, but really a derivative of it):

brew install johnhcc/gs-x11/gv

This will automatically install a version of Ghostscript with X11 enabled in the process (it is a dependency). You can optionally install the dependency by itself, it you want:

brew install johnhcc/gs-x11/ghostscript-x11

The main page is here:

https://github.com/johnhcc/homebrew-gs-x11

Answer 2

I'm not a Mac developer so I'm not completely familiar with Homebrew, but it does sound like the package has been built wiithout X11 support. The fact that --help doesn't list the device is pretty clear.

I do notice from the website that in the last 30 days there have been 2 downloads of --with-x11. So possibly they've removed X11 support recently.

The only other thing I can suggest (assuming you are comfortable with compiling yourself) is to get the sources from www.ghostscript.com, untar the source tarball, then in a terminal window, from the 'ghostpdl' directory, execute ./autogen.sh, then when that is complete, execute 'make'.

Assuming you have autotools, gcc and the X11 development package, that should build a version of Ghostscript which includes X support. Looking at the Homebrew forumla, and assuming this has worked for you in the past, I think you should be able to build Ghostscript that way.

You might want to add --disable-cups --disable-compile-inits --disable-gtk --disablefontconfig --without-libidn to the ./autogen.sh command line to mimic the Homebrew formula. I'm not sure why they disable CUPS, but whatever.

Other than that, this isn't really a Ghostscript question as such, you would need to contact whoever handles the Homebrew Ghostscript distribution, which isn't any of the Ghostscript development team.