[vox-tech] another PS2PDF question [solved]

[Dylan Beaudette]

On Monday 28 February 2005 12:46 pm, Jonathan Stickel wrote:
> Dylan Beaudette wrote:
> > 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!
>
> I don't know if your images are color or not, but your solution is not
> sufficient when dealing with embedded color images (at least for me).
> I've found that I need to edit the "epstopdf" script.  The two lines
> that deal with "GSOPTS" need to be changed to:
>
> my $GSOPTS = "-dAutoFilterColorImages=false
> -dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode ";
> $GSOPTS = "-dEncodeColorImages=false " unless $::opt_compress;
>
> In fact, it is OK to compress the images as long as Flate encoding is
> used rather that JPEG.  The above edit does this.

Ah... Interesting. I wonder how or if the "-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress" setting 
and the ones that you suggested are related. Before trying your method my 
images were looking good, with a final PDF size of 6.4Mb. After altering my 
epstopdf script as you suggested, the PDF file is 54Mb, and the images *seem* 
to be the same.... however it would take a bit of research to find out just 
how different they are. Any suggestions on a good place to search for 
answers?

> > 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.
>
> How does inkscape compare to xfig?

Well, it is a little easier on the eyes (similar to illustrator), but some 
features are still a little bit lacking... On Debian Testing it gets updated 
fairly often, and with each release gets better and better.


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