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Flattening Transparencies in PDF with Free Tools
Posted November 9, 2007 – 12:49 pm by Yakov Shafranovich in ProgrammingAn interesting issue has come up recently with my publishing company - one of our printing suppliers flagged incoming PDFs as being not-printable due to transparencies. After looking around for solutions, I came up with a way to resolve the issue without resorting to Acrobat (which we don’t use). The solution is two fold:
1. First convert the incoming PDF to PostScript using XPDF’s pdftops. This will flatten the transparencies. GhostScript’s pdf2ps tool DOES NOT do that.
2. Then convert the PostScript back to PDF using GhostScript’s ps2pdf tool.
Both tools are open source and free (although watch out for GhostScript’s GPL license). One important point - pdftops requires a paper width and height unless you want to end up with 8×11 paper for everything. The width/height is specified in PostScript points which are 72 per inch.
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