Re: printing problems because of memory consumption of gs

[Torsten]

On 12.01.2015 23:32, Doug Stewart wrote:
> 
> 
> On Mon, Jan 12, 2015 at 1:45 PM, Torsten <address@hidden
> <mailto:address@hidden>> wrote:
> 
>     On 04.01.2015 16:40, Torsten wrote:
>     > With a recent build from the gui-release branch I encounter the
>     problem
>     > that printing a figure (gnuplot) starts a gs-process that consumes
>     up to
>     > 2 GB of memory. This makes it nearly impossible to build the docs on a
>     > computer with only 2 GB. Plotting directly in gnuplot with an
>     eps-, pdf-
>     > or png-terminal is no problem. Is anyone else seeing this issue?
>     >
> 
>     If someone else runs into this: I found the reason and a workaround for
>     the issue described in my previous post. The problem bulding the docs
>     seems to be that the produced eps-files (voronoi.eps, triplot.eps, etc.)
>     have text entries of the form
> 
>       [ [({}) 200.0 0.0 true true 0 (0.2)]
>       ] -66.7 MRshow
> 
>     with a font '{}'. Debugging gs shows that gs can not find font '{}' and
>     then queries all system fonts. This action then consumes much resources.
>     This can be avoided by
> 
>       export GS_OPTIONS='-dNONATIVEFONTMAP -sSUBSTFONT=Helvetica'
> 
>     which prevents using native fonts and replace all unknown fonts by
>     Helvetica.
> 
>     Torsten
> 
> 
>  Thanks
> 
> This fixed the problem I was having since early Dec.
> 
> How can we make this automatic?
>  

This seems to be more a problem with gs on our systems (ubuntu 14.04 in
my case). Why does gs need 2 GB of memory when querying the available
system fonts? gnuplot itself includes the font into the generated
eps-file when plotting a diagram with eps terminal.

When using -FHelvetica in the print command, everything works as expected.

Torsten