Date: Tue, 30 Jun 1998 10:33:05 +0100 (BST) From: Scott Mitchell <scott@dcs.qmw.ac.uk> To: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> Cc: dkulp@neomorphic.com (David Kulp), ambrisko@whistle.com, multimedia@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: pdf pain... Message-ID: <199806300933.KAA01411@hotpoint.dcs.qmw.ac.uk> In-Reply-To: <199806300401.GAA09365@labinfo.iet.unipi.it> References: <199806300030.RAA24700@board66.cruzers.com> <199806300401.GAA09365@labinfo.iet.unipi.it>
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Luigi Rizzo said: >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. My department has a shared (as in one person can use it at a time) copy of the Adobe Distiller on a Mac. I have no idea how fast this Mac is soI can't offer any speed comparisons, but it does produce PDF that is generally smaller and faster to display than ghostscript. It's not *too* painful (really) to use the Mac for 5 minutes every so often when something needs to be converted. I tend to do this for final versions of documents and just use gs for the drafts. Since you need the PDF for other people, couldn't your department cough up for one Distiller licence? Scott -- =========================================================================== Scott Mitchell | PGP Key ID |"If I can't have my coffee, I'm just <scott@dcs.qmw.ac.uk> | 0x54B171B9 | like a dried up piece of roast goat" QMW College, London, UK | 0xAA775B8B | -- J. S. Bach. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-multimedia" in the body of the message
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