[cups.bugs] [LOW] STR #2138: pdftops creates invalidPS fromparticularPDF

[Michael Sweet]

Helge Blischke wrote:
> Michael Sweet wrote:
>> Hin-Tak Leung wrote:
>>
>>> ...
>>> Why was EPS gs changed in the first place? I know the excuse "customer
>>> prefers space than a black/white box", for which I can only say, "use 
>>> a different font with all the glyph you need"  - using .notdef, and only
>>> .notdef, is the correct behavior. That's the whole reason why there
>>> is a glyph called ".notdef"!
>>
>>
>> IIRC, the problem was with files that did not contain a .notdef
>> glyph.  Broken, yes, but unfortunately all too common... :(
>>
>> Ghostscript displayed a box, while EVERY PostScript printer displays
>> a blank space instead...
>>
> 
> The strange thing is: if I render the PDF using gs, I get no error
> or warning message, but if I convert the PDF to ps (using xpdf's pdftops,
> version 3.01 and render *that* using gs, I get the message
>     "substituting .notdef for space"
> Thus it might be a bug in xpdf's font conversion stuff?

AFAIK, Xpdf just copies the font data as-is (with the appropriate
encoding, but it doesn't interpret the data), so I'd guess that
Ghostscript has a built-in workaround for embedded fonts that Xpdf
lacks (because it doesn't actually run the embedded font program)

-- 
______________________________________________________________________
Michael Sweet, Easy Software Products           mike at easysw dot com
Internet Printing and Document Software          http://www.easysw.com