"H. S. Teoh" <[email protected]> writes: > 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.
It may be worth noting that somewhat counterintuitively running ps2pdf on a PDF file tends to work fine, producing a PDF file again in a single step without an intermediate ps file. -- David Kastrup
