[ale] Ghostscript: pdf2ps

[Joe Steele]

My experience with pdf2ps is that it wants to encode all the font 
characters as bitmaps within the file.  They not only take up a lot 
of space, they also scale poorly if their dpi doesn't match your 
final output device.

I've had better luck with pdftops which makes use of scalable fonts.  
For your application, you might also try pdftotext.  They both come 
with xpdf.

--Joe

-----Original Message-----
From:	Jeff Hubbs [SMTP:Jhubbs at niit.com]
Sent:	Monday, May 07, 2001 3:07 PM
To:	ale at ale.org
Subject:	[ale] Ghostscript: pdf2ps

I tried to use pdf2ps to translate an ~8.5MB .pdf file into Postscript.
Imagine my horror when resulting Postscript file was 112MB.  I looked at the
output and saw that there appeared to be a lot of "code" and not "content."
I could do word searches on the original .pdf, so I know that the text was
not simply rasterized.  Yet, gs appears to have made no attempt to actually
translate the text; in fact, it looks as though gs rasterized the content.  

My interest here is in taking tabular data from a .pdf file and munging it
via, say, perl.  My hope was that the human-unreadable .pdf file would
become more mungeable after being translated to PS.  Any suggestions?

- Jeff

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