[emp_zealoth]

http://savannah.gnu.org/bugs/?44050 I could easily reproduce the issue on a few different machines. I'm pretty sure it is ghostscript issue because it also hangs similarily when converting some images to pdfs. I can't remember if I even bothered to report the issue on GhostScript tracker - there are exactly the same issues being reported as early as 2008 all the way to today.

[mtmiller]

Hi, as one of the devs who commented on your issue (and the one who closed it as "not our problem"), I empathize with your position and agree that it can be frustrating to deal with large complex projects with a lot of dependencies. If any of our comments contributed to your feeling less welcome or less empowered to use or help improve Octave, then I sincerely apologize.

I have personally been affected by more than a couple of ghostscript bugs that have drastically impacted my use of Octave over the years, either crashing, busy waiting, or memory grabbing. My first response has always been to start digging into ghostscript to find out why it's screwing me over and try to fix it myself or come up with a workaround.

Not making an excuse, just offering that for myself one of the immeasurable advantages of working with completely free software is that I feel empowered to at least try to identify and fix problems when they happen.