Errors with Ghostscript

[Kirsty Lee]

Has anyone experienced errors with ghostscript converting some pdfs to pdfa. I've recently processed a collection and at normalisation stage some pdfs in the collection have failed normalisation for preservation. The output error being "Unable to open the initial device, quitting."

Can anyone enlighten me as to what this means and why its failed.

Thanks
Kirsty

[Rachel MacGregor]

HI Kirsty,

We had a problem which gave this result: 

GPL Ghostscript 9.10 (2013-08-30)

Copyright (C) 2013 Artifex Software, Inc.  All rights reserved.

This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.

   **** Warning:  An error occurred while reading an XREF table.

   **** The file has been damaged.  This may have been caused

   **** by a problem while converting or transfering the file.

   **** Ghostscript will attempt to recover the data.

Processing pages 1 through 1.

Page 1

 

   **** This file had errors that were repaired or ignored.

   **** The file was produced by:

   **** >>>> Microsoft� Word 2010 <<<<

   **** Please notify the author of the software that produced this

   **** file that it does not conform to Adobe's published PDF

   **** specification.

but we haven't investigated it properly (the file seemed OK when I briefly examined it).  I confess i have no idea if this is nothing to do with the problems you are having but would obviously be interested in any comments others might have!

Cheers

Rachel

Digital Archivist

The Library

Lancaster University

Bailrigg

Lancaster

LA1 4YH

+44 (0) 1524 595 229

@An_Old_Hand

www.lancaster.ac.uk/library

[Kirsty Lee]

Hi Rachel,

See I was wondering if it was the file but the output message wasn't as specific as yours. The fact that it converted some files and not others is a mystery to me. The output error doesn't help identify the problem.

Has anyone at Artefactual seen this?

Kirsty

[Sarah Romkey]

Hi Kirsty,

I'm not sure if we've seen this exact error. When it comes to errors in the tools that Archivematica uses such as Ghostscript it might be worthwhile to do some searching on the web for that specific error and see what comes up. I've done a little searching and unfortunately it sounds like this is a pretty generic Ghostscript error so it's hard to say what is going on.

Another troubleshooting method you could try is running the command as its described in the FPR at the commandline yourself- sometimes Archivematica doesn't print out all of the error message and you might get more information by interacting with Ghostscript directly.

Cheers,

Sarah

Sarah Romkey, MAS,MLIS

Archivematica Program Manager
Artefactual Systems
604-527-2056

@archivematica / @accesstomemory

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