On Thu, 3 Sep 2009 19:04:08 -0400 John Culleton <john at wexfordpress.com> dijo:
> > Well, of course,... PDF 1.3 does not support transparencies... > > > > Craig > Here is my solution: > 1. Export the document as pdf 1.4 or pdf 1.5 > 2. View the pdf in Acrobat reader. > 3. Print to file from Acrobat Reader, creating a postscript file. > 4. Convert that file to pdf using Ghostscript script ps2pdf13. > > Now you should have a smaller file with all the transparencies > preserved. John, You are a genius, sir. OK, I didn't follow your methodology exactly, but it led me to an even simpler solution. I could open the 1.4 or 1.5 file in Adobe Reader, although it took ten minutes. The problem was printing. Whether printing to a printer or to file, Reader could not do the job. I waited 45 minutes, but no output. One CPU was running at or near 100% all the time and the amount of RAM it was taking was changing a bit, so it was not locked up. It just couldn't image the file. I was going to try Okular next, but before doing that I decided to try Evince. I rarely use Evince because its print options are not very good. But when I tried the 1.4 and 1.5 files Evince opened them in a couple of minutes. So I tried printing to PS file. Evince started to spool the file very quickly, and it took only 25 minutes for the whole 132 pages. However, there was a slight problem. Evince will print to file, but you have an option to print to PDF file or to PS file. PDF is the default, and I didn't see the option box before hitting the OK button. As a result I printed the 1.4 file to a new PDF from Evince. I decided to let it go ahead and finish. And when it was done I opened the resulting PDF (69 MB v. 201 MB for the original 1.4 file) in Adobe Reader. Reader opened it in about a minute. I looked at the pages with the grayscale rectangles and they looked fine on screen. I printed them to a Laserjet using the PCL driver and they came out exactly as they were supposed to. So for future reference, it you use Evince you can accomplish the same thing in one pass without having to write PS and then use ps2pdf to convert it to PDF. I have one remaining glitch with PDF export of this document, but it is unrelated to the transparency issue so I'll post it in a new thread.
