ps2pdf making very large pdf files

[Martijn van Oosterhout]

On Tue, Sep 17, 2002 at 11:21:20AM +1000, John Griffiths wrote:
> in windows acro distiller performs an equivalent task (but is not so easily
> customised to suit our purposes, plus i'm trying to move away from windows
> reliance)
> 
> the acro distiller output is of similar quality to look at but varies from
> 75% to 10% of the file sizes for equivalent jobs..

Yep, acro distiller is a very different beast. ps2pdf does some format
conversion but basically does nothing. Distiller on the other hand does
stuff like resampling images to the requested resolution, subsetting of
fonts so only the used glyphs are included, merging of duplicate included
images / fonts / functions and other such stuff. The end result is that
distiller does a better job.

Unfortunatly I havn't seen an open-source product come close to it.

> 
> At 11:14 AM 9/17/02 +1000, Brett Worth wrote:
> >On Tue, 17 Sep 2002, John Griffiths wrote:
> >
> >> I've got a debian 3.0 system running gs 7.05 and samba and I'm using it as
> >> a pdf printer
> >
> >I'm not sure you want to use ghostscript to do this.  Once you've converted
> >the PDF to postscript it should just go straight to the postscript engine
> >on the printer.  Sounds like you might be rasterising the output with
> >ghostscript and sending a graphical representation of the pages to the HP
> >using HPGL.
> >
> >If the ghostscript is what you need for good looking output then maybe
> >you'll also have to deal with the large files.
> > 
> >-- 
> >Brett
> >
> >

-- 
Martijn van Oosterhout   <kleptog at svana.org>   http://svana.org/kleptog/
> There are 10 kinds of people in the world, those that can do binary
> arithmetic and those that can't.