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Date:      Tue, 30 Jun 1998 06:01:53 +0200 (MET DST)
From:      Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
To:        dkulp@neomorphic.com (David Kulp)
Cc:        ambrisko@whistle.com, multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG
Subject:   Re: pdf pain...
Message-ID:  <199806300401.GAA09365@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
In-Reply-To: <199806300030.RAA24700@board66.cruzers.com> from "David Kulp" at Jun 29, 98 05:29:45 pm

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Ok, thanks to all those who pointed out that ghostscript can emit pdf.

I tried with a non-compressed ps output from dvips and size seems to
remain about the same. it is fast, the only issue is the absence of
compression. But that i will leave as an issue for those who are asking
me for PDF instead of gzipped postscript :)

>        does not compress the output at all, except for  character
>        bitmaps:  it  can't  use  LZW  because  of  Unisys' patent
>        claims, and it doesn't yet use other  compression  methods
>        for images.

actually, i saw some posting on the LZW patent mentioning that the
non-us (europe) patent only refers to hardware implementations ... i'll
try to dig it out and post it (maybe one can come out with non-us
gs patches... similar to the crypto stuff...)

Speaking of the opposite conversion (pdf->ps) that Jim mentioned:
ghostscript is very slow at this and produces huge files (a pain when
you have to print a page in the middle of a long document since it appears
to scan the whole document at the same slow pace). Acroread also
produces huge files, although it is quite slow as well (faster than
ghostscript, but much slower than both during rendering -- this i
don't understand, perhaps it is because it generates 16 times as
much data because the resolution goes up from 72dpi to 300dpi ?
(but when producing postscript it really shouldn't generate bitmaps!)

Anyways... i get what i pay for, just wondering if the commercial
version of the adobe tools are similarly slow.

	cheers
	luigi

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