Upon starting, PS_View creates two windows: the image window and the console window (the second window is normally hidden, cf. Figure 2.1).
The image window
The console window
A drop-down menu is located in the upper part of the window. It allows to control the program with the mouse or, with the Alt key pressed, by pressing underlined letters and digits. There are also keyboard shortcuts (given to the right of the menu field names), which allow for convenient access to the most often used program functions without the need to unfold the menu.
The main part of the window is occupied by the cutout of the chosen page of the viewed document. In case of ordinary PS and PDF documents the page is represented as a white rectangular with the dimensions of the bounding box, placed on a grey background. If the bounding box is undefined, the grey background is not being used. The grey background can be switched on (off) with Options -> Background off (on).
Document state information is being displayed in the status bar in the lower part of the window. From the left it contains:
This is a text window accompanying the PS_View program. It contains the transcript of the dialog conducted with GhostScript (the detail level of the transcript can be regulated with the startup parameters -v and -q). The console window plays an important role during debugging, as when an error is encountered in the viewed document, the console window will have a fuller description of the error situation. The user can trigger the console window on with the menu command Options -> Show PS console or by calling the program with the -c option. The console might be closed in a standard way by clicking on the upper right corner of its window. If the user writes into the console, any text entered is being interpreted as a sequence of PostScript commands. One can enter PostScript commands even in the image window - they are being passed to the console even when its window is hidden.