[OT?] GhostScript bug writing tiffg3 to stdout

Tilman Schmidt tilman at imap.cc
Thu Jul 7 10:19:47 PDT 2011


It seems that GhostScript version 8.64 has a bug in the tiffg3 driver when writing to standard output. Comparing the output of the two commands:

% /usr/bin/gs -q -dPARANOIDSAFER -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=tiffg3 -sOutputFile=- -r204x196 -sPAPERSIZE=a4 /var/spool/cups/tmp/pstofaxvhVNCp -sstdout=/dev/null > /tmp/testpstofax1.tiff
% /usr/bin/gs -q -dPARANOIDSAFER -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=tiffg3 -sOutputFile=- -r204x196 -sPAPERSIZE=a4 /var/spool/cups/tmp/pstofaxvhVNCp -sstdout=/dev/null | cat > /tmp/testpstofax2.tiff

Only the first one (/tmp/testpstofax1.tiff) is a valid TIFF file.
The second one (/tmp/testpstofax2.tiff) causes consumers like capifax
or gwenview to choke, complaining:

Invalid strip byte count, strip 0.

Looking closer, I notice that the second one is longer:

% ls -l /tmp/testpstofax*
-rw-r--r-- 1 ts   users 40492  7. Jul 19:08 /tmp/testpstofax1.tiff
-rw-r--r-- 1 ts   users 40501  7. Jul 19:08 /tmp/testpstofax2.tiff

More precisely, it has the nine additional bytes
"00 ff ff ff ff 00 00 00 00" appended with respect to the first one.

For me this means that GhostScript cannot be used in a pipe.

Comments?





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