What is causing Ghostscript to return an error of -100?

Question

So, I am using Matthew Ephraim\'s GhostscriptSharp, which is a simple C# wrapper for the unmanaged Win32 Ghostscript DLL in my ASP.Net MVC project. Some background:

Wha

Answer 1

So, ended up being an ID10T error that was derailing me here in this specific instance.

In Matthew Ephraim's GhostscriptSharp code, he uses a couple of enums to define the options set forth for Ghostscript, and two in particular were the GhostscriptDevices and GhostscriptPageSizes enums. Problem is, the way they're written Resharper (Jetbrains Visual Studio plugin) has default rules for naming Enum members. Not thinking, I fixed all of these definitions to please Resharper not realizing that these are passed directly to Ghostscript, so instead of getting a7 for -sPAPERSIZE GS was getting A7, and for -sDEVICE it was getting Jpeg instead of jpeg.

For the time being permissions weren't a problem on my end, but only because I run the Cassini web dev test server in Visual Studio.

Thanks to @MarkRedman and @tvanfosson for their helpful suggestions!

Answer 2

Most likely the process running the web application does not have permission to write to the directories that you are using. I'd suggest creating some specific directory for the app to use and a local id to use to run the app pool, then give that id enough privileges to read/write the directory you've created.

Answer 3

The -100 error is a generic "fatal error" in GhostScript.

A few things to check:

1) Permissions (al operations require file access)

2) Scope, you want to add the GS bin folder to the PATH variables

3) Consider not calling GhostScript directly from asp.net, GS can be very CPU intensive, rather process files in a separate service

I have also created a wrapper, send me an email (address on profile) and I will send it you. It allows one to pass in the GS bin folder which helps.