[vox-tech] another PS2PDF question [solved]

[Dylan Beaudette]

On Monday 28 February 2005 11:02 am, Dylan Beaudette wrote:
> Hi,
>
> I have a poster (36" x 48") that is saved in PS format.
>
> using epstopdf, i can create a PDF file that has the correct page
> dimensions, but the JPEG compression makes the images in the PDF look bad.
>
> even with the --nocompression flag, PDFs from epstopdf still contain some
> compression artifacts...
>
> I have tried using ps2pdf14 like this:
>
> ps2pdf14 -dAutoFilterxxxImages=false -dAutoRotatePages=/None
> -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress poster.ps
>
> ... in the past this has produced nice PDFs without compression artifacts,
> but for some reason, when i try to use this with a poster sized PS file,
> the resulting PDF is clipped to about 8.5" x 11" ....
>
> any ideas on how to either:
> 1. create a PDF from epstopdf without *any* JPEG compression
> or
> 2. get a full-sized PDF from ps2pdf14
>
> ?
>
> thanks in advance for any ideas... this is a problem that has been driving
> me nuts for a while now...

Well, after a little bit of googling, it looks like there was a rather simple 
solution. Since ps2pdf14 and epstopdf were just sending some pre-defined 
parameters to ghost script, it is possible to setup the gs environment, and 
then call epstopdf:

export GS_OPTIONS=-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress
epstopdf --nocompress file.eps

This will produce a PDF of the correct page size, without JPEG compression on 
embedded images!

Just for the record, this allows one to create a poster in something like 
Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/), an opensource page layout program, and 
then save the file as an EPS. Unfortunately this EPS file is not easily sent 
to a printer (tried opening it in Illustrator 10, and there were numerous 
propblems in terms of printable area, etc.), thus the above method will 
create a JPEG compression-less PDF which can easily be printed from a PDF 
viewer. 

Cheers,

-- 
Dylan Beaudette
Soils and Biogeochemistry Graduate Group
University of California at Davis
530.754.7341