[lug] printing pdfs to postscript printers

[Elyse M. Grasso]

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?

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.
-- 
Elyse Grasso

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