Symptoms: When setting display resolution to 978.177dpi or higher, with zoom resolution to 300dpi under GSView (which is slightly smaller than the '1600%' setting in Acrobat Reader 5), Ghostscript returns following message: AFPL Ghostscript 8.53 (2005-10-20) Copyright (C) 2005 artofcode LLC, Benicia, CA. All rights reserved. This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details. Unrecoverable error: VMerror in .setdevice Operand stack: false --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- --nostringval-- Failed to open device or install ViewerPreProcess hook: returns -25 Page size may have been too large or resolution too high. Resetting page size and resolution On systems with 64MB, GSView simply slows to a halt by disk swapping when display resolution is increased to 403. On systems with sufficient memory, the time for Ghostscript and GSView to render a page increases exponentially. Such problems do not occur on other PDF viewers, including Adobe Reader. When monitoring memory consumption via System Monitor, I discover that memory consumption increases very quickly, up to 371.2M when viewing annots.pdf with GSview and setting display resolution to 978.176. That translates to over 3 times of memory consumption when just loading GSview alone. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Ghostscript version (or include output from "gs -h"): 8.51-8.53 ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Where you got Ghostscript: Ghostscript.com ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Hardware system you are using (including printer model if the problem involves printing): Memory: 320MB CPU: Intel Pentium II 400 Sound: ESS Solo-1 Video: Neomagic MagicMedia 256AV ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Operating system you are using: Windows 98SE ------------------------------------------------------------------------ Suggested fix, if any: I contacted GSView author about this, but the response I got was that GSView allocates memory for the entire canvas, not just the visible portion of a page. I also learnt that GSView author had talked with Artiflex on building a new Ghostscript display driver that will automatically convert Postscript to PDF during load, and possibly even native object lists, which will allow GSView to monitor the visible boundaries of objects and reduce memory consumption, but the deal apparantly ended in failure. This bug may look like a simple case of Ghostscript can't accept higher zoom factors, but it is only a symptom of bigger problem. The current Ghostscript and GSView combination uses way too much memory than necessary, runs slowly with high zoom settings, and even for systems with enough computing resources, Ghostscript simply refuses to run at high zoom settings. From what I've learnt from all this, this problem requires developers from Ghostscript and GSView to resolve. It is important for both sides work together to resolve it, not just for efficiency sake, but also to prevent all sort of other problems generated by the current Ghostscript+GSView rendering mechanism.
This is related to Bug 688468. There is something gsview can do directly, which is to set a small page size and prepend a translate before running the job. This will render the whole document, but clip against the viewable subset. Once that's done, scrolling can be implemented by adding tile-based rendering using the same method. That should resolve the memory issues.
Need to discuss with Russell.
For what it is worth, this statement "Such problems do not occur on other PDF viewers, including Adobe Reader." is inaccurate - xpdf has a very similiar problem until recently. (and worse still, xpdf limit resolution to 400%).
This bug report is more than five years old. Is this still happening with gsview-5.0?
(In reply to Pablo Rodríguez from comment #4) > This bug report is more than five years old. > > Is this still happening with gsview-5.0? We've completely rewritten gsview, 5.0 work will not be continued, the new gsview 6.0 can be found here: www.gsview.com. Report issues in Bugzilla under the product "Artifex GSview". I notice it only zooms up to 500% on the mac and 400% on windows which is a bug, we should do as well as Adobe. I'll report that one.