cliddell, thank you for this hint. Ubuntu uses the Ghostscript "ps2write" device for turning incoming PDF to PostScript. Desktop applications usually send PDF and if the user has a PostScript printer this conversion happens. But also if there are legacy PPDs of printer drivers which require PostScript as input such a conversion happens. This is no big problem as the data will get printed on paper, so no searchability is needed.
cups-pdf upstream (and in Oneiric/11.10) is an example for a printer driver which requires PostScript as input and so makes CUPS converting PDF to PostScript via the Ghostscript "ps2write" device, so incoming PDF is unnecessarily converted into PostScript and back into PDF when cups- pdf is used. In 10.04 I had applied a patch to cups-pdf to make it accept PDF as input and in that case do not do any conversion, to simplify and speed up the workflow, especially to make it more reliable, but we dropped the patch again because the configurability of cups-pdf got lost when the input was PDF (due to Ghostscript not being executed any more for the Postscript->PDF conversion). So my recommendation is to avoid using cups-pdf. Use the "Print to file" featire in the printing dialogs of GNOME/GTK applications and the "File"->"Export to PDF" feature in OpenOffice.org/LibreOffice. cups-pdf was created formally as applications had no possibility to export a document into a PDF file and their print functionality only generated PostScript. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/942866 Title: Ubuntu 11.10: printing to PDF produces unsearchable PDF (contrary to 10.04) To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups-pdf/+bug/942866/+subscriptions -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list [email protected] https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
