Hi Peter Am Donnerstag, 15. April 2010 04:17:47 schrieb Peter Thorkelson: > hello, > > I downloaded scribus 1.3.6 for my Mac OSX 10.5.8. > > I may already be in way over my head. I had hopes that I would get > something like quark express, but the first thing that happened was I > got an advisory: > > "The following programs are missing: > Ghostscript : You cannot use EPS images or Print Preview" > > why would I be offered a download with missing programs?
Well, obviously because they are not installed. This is similar to installing a closed source complaining that you need Service Pack x or Hotfix y (or Internet Explorer ;) ) to be able to run the program. And the dialog actually tells the truth: EPS import and print preview won't work without Ghostscript. > AND/OR what is ghostscript? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ghostscript is good starting point. On a sidenote: While I don't want to sound snarky, I wonder why in this day and age someone who can download Scribus can't use a search engine like Google and type in "Ghostscript." ;) > AND/OR how do I get ghostscript? You can download it here: http://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/GPL/gs871/ghostscript-8.71-macosx.tar.gz or install a package manager for OS X and use darwinports. You can find a description here: http://ghostscript.darwinports.com/ > AND/OR how important > is it? See above. > > every effort I make to understand seems to lead me deeper into > incomprehensibility. > > of course nobody is making me feel it, but I o feel like a kid who > hasn't been taught cursive trying to decipher a handwritten discourse > on subatomic physics. I'm not stupid (or so I've been led to > believe), but this is way out of reach for me. It's just another way of handling software installations. On Linux/UNIX application binaries are comparatively small, but they rely on other programs or so-called libraries being installed. While Mac OS X is a UNIX operating system, the preferred (Apple) way of installing software is actually the opposite of the Linux/UNIX "philosophy", since application developers are encouraged to include almost everything in a single application bundle. That's why a Linux/UNIX program can have the size of 20 MB, whereas the equivalent OS X bundle (a DMG most of the time) can easily exceed 200 MB. Both approaches have their advantages. On Linux/UNIX, you may run into so-called dependency issues and/or conflicts, for instance when one program requires a certain library version, and the next program requires another. Distributions like Debian, Fedora or OpenSUSE will resolve these issues for you, but then you depend on their package managers. OS X application bundles, by contrast, don't have this problem (provided you are using an appropriate version of the OS), but a lot of disk space is being wasted by duplicative files and libraries. Windows is somewhere in-between these extremes, and the hybrid approach results in a lot of other problems (just google for "dll hell"). HTH Christoph
