[cups.general] MacOSX landscape problems with pdftops

Michael Sweet mike at easysw.com
Tue Jan 3 12:46:21 PST 2006


Paul Ortman wrote:
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> Michael Sweet wrote:
>> Use the CUPS-provided pdftops filter instead.
> 
> Thanks, I download the official tarball and moved over just the pdftops
> filter to my system and thinks work quite well now.
> 
> I'm curious, what are the differences are between the two filters?  Is

The CUPS pdftops filter doesn't set the page size via setpagedevice,
and it doesn't try to automatically rotate the page to fit on the
media.  In addition, we use the PPD file to set the imageable area
so that pages are properly offset and scaled when those options are
chosen.

> something else going to subtlety break now?  Why the confusing state
> (and annoying non-default behavior from Gentoo -- which I plan on
> reporting as a bug) with the two filters?  A difference of opinion

The Gentoo (and Debian, and a whole host of other) folks don't want
to use the CUPS-provided pdftops since they then have to maintain
two separate sets of security patches whenever a problem is found in
Xpdf.  The newer version of Xpdf (which is part of CUPS 1.2) also
renders some PDF files better than the older 2.x version in CUPS
1.1.x.

I've talked with the Xpdf author about adding an installable (GPL)
library option with the standard Xpdf release, which we could then
link to.  Previously he was open to the idea but wasn't rushing out
to add it to the GPL release as he has his own company that is
licensing the Xpdf technology... :)

Anyways, I'm hoping that we can come up with a solution that
satisfies all, but there may still be some growing pains over the
next year...

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




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