On Oct 28, 2011, at 10:29 AM, Tassilo Horn wrote:

> Perry Smith <pedzsan@gmail.com> writes:
> 
> Hi Perry,
> 
>> I'm running emacs 24.0.90 on a Mac 10.7.2.  I open a pdf and it first
>> appears as raw text.  I try "doc-view-mode" and I get this stack
>> (after setting debug-on-error).
>> 
>>>  locate-file-internal(nil ("/usr/bin" "/bin" "/usr/sbin" "/sbin"
>>> "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/libexec"
>>> "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin" "/usr/local/bin") ("") 1)
>>>  locate-file(nil ("/usr/bin" "/bin" "/usr/sbin" "/sbin"
>>> "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/libexec"
>>> "/Applications/Emacs.app/Contents/MacOS/bin" "/usr/local/bin") ("") 1)
>>>  executable-find(nil)
>>>  doc-view-initiate-display()
>>>  doc-view-mode()
>>>  call-interactively(doc-view-mode t nil)
>>>  execute-extended-command(nil)
>>>  call-interactively(execute-extended-command nil nil)
> 
> It seems you've built emacs without PNG support, or ghostscript is not
> on your PATH.  Therefore, doc-view falls back to show you the plain text
> contents of the PDF, and then it fails because
> `doc-view-pdftotext-program' is also not oun your PATH.
> 
> The reason for not showing the PDF as images should be messaged, so
> check your *Messages* buffer.

Ahh... yes:

> No PNG support is available, or some conversion utility for pdf files is missing.

Thanks,
pedz