[Pkg-cups-devel] Bug#673289: Bug#670055: cups-filters: diff for version 1.0.18-2 uploaded to DELAYED/2 for #670055

Till Kamppeter till.kamppeter at gmail.com
Tue May 22 14:06:15 UTC 2012


On 05/22/2012 03:11 PM, Tobias Hoffmann wrote:
> Well, it's still not clear, who should fix what:
>
> 1. cups-pdf should probably announce that it can not only process PS,
> but also PDF. I'm not sure if the current cups-filter architecture
> handles this case well. This bug would be one of cups-pdf or
> cups-filter(?).

This is a cups-pdf problem. I have even fixed it once by doing some 
slight changes on cups-pdf, making the PPD file accepting both PDF and 
PostScript as input and modifying the backend script to skip Ghostscript 
if the input is already PDF. Upstream did not accept this patch as one 
can modify the output by a variety of options in the config file and 
these options are implemented via Ghostscript.

I suggest then to do a slightly different approach, only skipping 
Ghostscript if the settings in the config file are the default settings 
and otherwise using Ghostscript also with PDF input, simply feeding PDF 
into Ghostscript.

See

debian/patches/70_cups-pdf_support-pdf-workflow.patch

in cups-pdf 2.5.0-17 on

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/cups-pdf/2.5.0-17

> 2. It's unclear to me what the policy regarding pdftops is wrt. to using
> popper vs. ghostscript as converting agent. gs generates Type 3 (which
> causes problems), poppler does not. This can be fixed in pdftops, i.e.
> cups-filter, (use poppler tools in this case), or ghostscript (don't
> generate Type 3 -- there might be some commandline switches)

For pdftops I was always tending to use Ghostscript as Ghostscript has 
once better color management and is designed more with printing in mind. 
At the release of Ubuntu Precise (12.04) I have found out that 
Ghostscript's PS output has problems with several PostScript printers 
due to bugs in the printer's PS interpreters. I added some workarounds 
to the pdftops filter for that. Which PostScript consumers do not like 
Type 3 fonts? Should I make Ghostscript only sending Type 2 fonts?

Chris, is there a command line switch to make Ghostscript's "ps2write" 
device only sending Type 2 fonts?

> 3. The issue, that the Type 3 bounding boxes generated by ghostscript
> are deemed bad by poppler/evince. The experts from ghostscript and
> poppler have to determine who is wrong (it might even be caused by the
> original font file). Therefore this is either a poppler/evince,
> ghostscript or font bug.
>

Chris, can it be that there is a bug in Ghostscript?

    Till





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