Am Donnerstag, 2. August 2012 schrieb Roger Leigh: > 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.
Roger, many thanks for taking the time to explain the switch from PostScript to PDF in such a great detail. I found your posts to be a really informative read. Thanks, -- Martin 'Helios' Steigerwald - http://www.Lichtvoll.de GPG: 03B0 0D6C 0040 0710 4AFA B82F 991B EAAC A599 84C7 -- 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/201208022040.26249.mar...@lichtvoll.de
