This is not a question, merely an informational addition for anyone else having similar problems. I am putting it in the Slack specific section, as that is what I am running...

Struggled with this problem for a while, and searched for answers here, but the only links I found were people having similar trouble and blaming their printers and/or drivers and unable to resolve the difficulties.

Problem: Ghostscript shutting itself down, with the prominent error message being "(fontname) invalidfont etc..." Able to view images with XPDF, but no text. Unable to print documents from any application containing certain fonts, or unable to print at all (printer initializing, priming, but no pages printed).

Solution: Download the two ghostscript font packages "ghostscript-fonts-std-XX.tar.gz" and "ghostscript-fonts-other-XX.tar.gz" available through ftp://mirror.cs.wisc.edu/pub/mirrors/ghost/ . Extract the contents of the font folders contained in these .gz's into your /usr/share/ghostscript/7.05/lib directory (this location is slack 8.1 specific, but easily adapted to other installations I'd think), and yer all fixed up.

I can't guarantee this is the only, or best solution, but it works.

Good luck!