pdf with transparent image and cups rasterfilter

[Till Kamppeter]

On 06/11/2010 11:29 PM, Paul Newall wrote:
> Ubuntu 9.10
> evince 2.28.1
> poppler 0.12.0
> cups 1.4.1
>
> The file was made in MS word 2007, evince says it is pdf v 1.5. It's a tga image with some transparent areas positioned over the top of some text, so should not be very complex (though who knows what MS word actually does?).
> It displays correctly in evince.
> The print preview looks OK in evince.
> But printing from evince results in a blank page, and a quick look at what happens in my filter suggests the raster is all zero bytes.
>
> However, I can print to file in evince, making a postscript file.
> If I open that ps file in evince, it looks OK and prints OK.
>
>  From the cups error log it looks as though evince normally sends the pdf file to cups, without first converting to ps.
> So I guess cups is not managing to convert this pdf to a raster, but evince can convert it to ps OK when it prints to file?
>
> If you want to play with the file, it is here:
> https://sourceforge.net/projects/cupsdriverkodak/files/SampleTransparent.pdf/download
>

What evince actually does is generating a new PDF file which is around 
10 times bigger than the original. This file is too big and awkward for 
the (Poppler-based) pdftops CUPS filter to turn it into PostScript. Also 
other PDF-related CUPS filters, like the Ghostscript-based pdftoraster 
filter which comes with Debian and Ubuntu has often problems with these 
files.

This is a bug in evince. evince should simply pass through the PDFs and 
printing will work.

    Till