Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 14:04:29 -0400 (EDT) From: Luoqi Chen <luoqi@watermarkgroup.com> To: dkulp@neomorphic.com, luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it Cc: ambrisko@whistle.com, multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: pdf pain... Message-ID: <199806301804.OAA05444@lor.watermarkgroup.com>
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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...) Newer versions of PDF (>=1.2?) supports zlib based compression and it is preferred over the LZW compression -- Adobe Distiller on my Mac generates zlib compressed streams. It wouldn't be too hard to teach ghostscript to do that. -lq > 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 To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message
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