On Sat, Sep 11, 2021 at 09:35:00PM +0200, Valentin Petzel wrote: > From what I see pdftops appears to be intelligent enough to rasterize > the file only if it does actually contain transparency. If it does it > uses a much less smooth rasterization that is probably not fit for > printing, so be careful with this! See the attached picture for a > comparisation, the left one is poppler (pdftops), the right one gs > (pdf2ps).
I experimented with pstops, and it does seem to produce a non-rasterized PS file, which can then be converted back to PDF without transparency, thus sidestepping this issue. I'll use that as a workaround for now. :-D [...] > But anyway. Usually there should not be any reason to convert from pdf > to ps, apart from printing or doing ps-style manipulations. But ps is > only a subset of pdf, so the conversion in that direction cannot > always be done in an acceptable manner. I discovered that converting the pdf to ps and back again significantly reduces the file size. So it's kinda my poor-man's way of compressing pdfs. Of course, this only works if your pdf doesn't contain any features incompatible with ps, which in my case is true. And now that I know that pdftops does a proper job with the conversion even when there is transparency, it's a sufficiently-acceptable solution to this issue. > Also I have tested gv on the pdf-files, but I’m not experiencing these > delays. [...] I wonder if it has to do with the amount of available RAM, as my PC is 10+ years old, so on a more modern machine the difference would be unnoticeable. T -- If it tastes good, it's probably bad for you.
