[lug] printing pdfs to postscript printers

[Matt Thompson]

On Thu, 2004-07-22 at 09:55, Elyse M. Grasso wrote:
> I have some pdf files that I would like to get hardcopies of. The PDF files 
> themselves are in the 2 to 10 megabyte range and print, albeit slowly, on 
> Windows systems with inkjet printers attached.
> 
> They hang after a few pages when I try to print them from my Linux laptop to 
> my antique postscript printer. 
> 
> Using pdf2ps I have discovered that  a 5 meg pdf file expands to a 337 MB ps 
> file, so I'm clearly running out of memory to build the page images in the 
> printer. Not to mention temp and spool space on the laptop (KDE gets really 
> cranky when it runs out of temp space... and the symptoms are strange)
> 
> This file size explosion is especially surprising since pdf and postscript are 
> both Adobe formats, and pdf is supposed to be derived from postscript. Is 
> this really normal?

With pdf2ps, yes in my experience.  It always seems to cause my files to
blow up.  That said, I don't think I've ever seen that kind of
explosion.

One question is have you tried pdftops (from xpdf)?  I use that more
than pdf2ps because it seems to be faster, have smaller output, and,
usually, has 10021390x better text output.  This is especially true in
newer versions where anti-aliasing and all the TrueType options have
defaulted on.  (I had some ancient xresources for xpdf for a long time.)

> As a side note, can anyone point me to an explanation of how to get the 
> Acrobat reader to print to a CUPS print queue? The print dialog in Acrobat 
> 5.0 is ... idiosyncratic, and I'm wondering if it does a better job of the 
> translation than the native linux utilities.

No help from me here.  I have solely gone to xpdf and, very rarely, gpdf
(which is still way too huge and slow, but can reproduce some files xpdf
chokes on).  In xpdf, the print dialog is so bare it's just the lpr
commandline and a page selector.

Frankly, I won't support Adobe on Linux until a Reader 6 comes out that
actually lets me use it without that whole LANG=C nonsense.  I *like*
Unicode.

Matt
-- 
Learning just means you were wrong and they were right. - Aram
   Matt Thompson -- http://ucsub.colorado.edu/~thompsma/
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