** Changed in: poppler
Status: Confirmed => Unknown
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/382379
Title:
pdftops CUPS filter has several problems
Status in Poppler:
Unknown
Status in cups package in Ubuntu:
Fix Released
Status in poppler package in Ubuntu:
Fix Released
Status in cups source package in Jaunty:
Fix Released
Status in poppler source package in Jaunty:
Fix Released
Bug description:
In the beginning, CUPS shipped a pdftops filter based on the
/usr/bin/pdftops utility of Poppler. It produces DSC-conforming
PostScript which can easily be processed by further filters. It also
leaves text as text and embeds the fonts. Its problem is that it does
not support documents with multiple page sizes. In this case it scales
all pages to the size of the first page (bug 310575,
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19777).
To get around that, and also in the hope to get color management
working more quickly, I switched to Ghostscript for the pdftops
filter in CUPS. It solved the multiple-page-size problem perfectly but
caused several other problems.
I started with the "pswrite" output device of Ghostscript. Its output
is also DSC-conforming, but it turns all text characters to bitmaps,
causing huge PostScript files (bug 377011), broken text characters
(bug 362186), slow job processing (bug 289852), output files which are
not searchable (bug 381788).
So I tried the "ps2write" output device of Ghostscript. Its output is
not DSC-conforming, so it can only be used in the pdftops filter when
the PDF workflow is used, where the page manipulations are done by the
pdftopdf filter which runs always before pdftops. In the upstream CUPS
without filter additions incoming PDF is turned to PostScript by the
pdftops filter and after that the pstops filter does the page
management and this requires DSC-conforming PostScript. It actually
solved the problems of "pswrite" producing a PostScript of reasonable
size and with embedded fonts, but it is still not perfect, for example
it produces code which does not run on some PostScript printers (bug
377011) and the text searchability is also not perfect (bug 381788).
As it turns out that Ghostscript has too many problems in its two
PostScript output devices, I am looking into returning to Poppler, as
they have only the one minor problem of the multiple page size output,
which I have fixed. I have submitted the patch upstream (see
https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=19777) and I also attach
a debdiff for the Ubuntu package of Poppler. This adds a new output
mode to the PostScript output device of Poppler which conserves the
original page sizes and orientations.
Once this new Poppler versions is uploaded, we can change the pdftops
filter of CUPS to use Poppler and patch it to use the new
"-origpagesizes" option for the /usr/bin/pdftops call.
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