On Tue, Jul 31, 2012 at 02:06:07PM +0000, Camaleón wrote: > On Tue, 31 Jul 2012 19:43:13 +1200, Chris Bannister wrote: > > > On Mon, Jul 30, 2012 at 04:51:11PM +0000, Camaleón wrote: > >> I just wanted to point a scenario where the jump to a PDF filter as the > >> default backend can have its troubles and not be nor as good nor as > >> simple nor as easy as the white papers say. Companies have always > >> showed different needs than users and these "jumps" are seen > >> differently when you have to hold them as user or as admin. > > > > The understanding I got from reading Roger's post was that if you are > > using CUPS, *THEN* you are automatically using "a PDF filter paradigm" > > because it **is considered superior/"more robust"**. > > That's what CUPS developers seem to claim (?) but having used PS printers > and PS backend as default for all these years, I'm a bit reluctant about > grandiloquent wordings with no more technical proofs on the superiority > of one on the proposed systems over the other.
If you want technical proof, please download the specs for both from Adobe's website and compare them. Both are freely downloadable. http://partners.adobe.com/public/developer/en/ps/PLRM.pdf http://www.adobe.com/devnet/acrobat/pdfs/pdf_reference_1-7.pdf The wikipedia pages for both are also reasonably informative. The fact is, PDF *is* the continuation of PostScript. It's just an evolved form of PostScript in a binary format. More accurately, both formats are implementations of the "Adobe imaging model"; until PDF 1.4, both of these formats implemented the same set of primitives. PDF 1.4 and later implement new additions to the imaging model, while PostScript will not see any new releases. If you look at all the drawing primitives contained within PostScript, they are all right there in PDF. If you take any PostScript document, you can execute it and transform all the drawing commands to their PDF equivalent. That's why it's trivial to to the conversion. The converse is not always true: because PDF is a *superset* of the PostScript drawing model, and so you potentially lose information going the other way, because you might have to convert a single PDF primitive into multiple PostScript primitives which only /approximate/ the PDF. You can read a nice overview of the history and relationship between the two here: http://www.prepressure.com/postscript/basics/history I hope from the above you'll understand that is indisputable that 1) PDF has a more technically sophisticated imaging model 2) PDF is the de-facto standard for professional document printing 3) PostScript is no longer being developed, and PDF is its successor Moving to a PDF based printing workflow is an improvement due to being technically superior and the logical way to go. Regards, Roger -- .''`. Roger Leigh : :' : Debian GNU/Linux http://people.debian.org/~rleigh/ `. `' schroot and sbuild http://alioth.debian.org/projects/buildd-tools `- GPG Public Key F33D 281D 470A B443 6756 147C 07B3 C8BC 4083 E800 -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/20120802170219.gr25...@codelibre.net
