From owner-freebsd-multimedia  Tue Jun 30 11:43:31 1998
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Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 14:04:29 -0400 (EDT)
From: Luoqi Chen <luoqi@watermarkgroup.com>
Message-Id: <199806301804.OAA05444@lor.watermarkgroup.com>
To: dkulp@neomorphic.com, luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it
Subject: Re: pdf pain...
Cc: ambrisko@whistle.com, multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG
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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

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