Friday, November 9th, 2007
An 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 ...
Posted in Programming | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, July 25th, 2007
One of the more mundane tasks that faces every publishing business like mine is data conversion. Recently, I have been involved in a major project which seeks to make available several hundred titles in print on demand format. Unfortunatly, the library that scanned these titles did not use PDF ...
Posted in Programming | No Comments »
Wednesday, May 4th, 2005
(This post was part of a separate "Standards Blog" which has been merged into my main blog)
Slashdot posted a story about the approval of the new OpenDocument standard by OASIS. The actual standard is available in PDF and OpenOffice formats. The obvious focus of this activity is against Microsoft and ...
Posted in Standards | 1 Comment »
Wednesday, April 27th, 2005
(This post was part of a separate "Standards Blog" which has been merged into my main blog.)
Quite a few news outlets are carrying the story of Microsoft inventing a new technology called "Metro" intended to replace Adobe's PDF format. According to Microsoft Watch " Metro is a "new fixed ...
Posted in Standards | 1 Comment »
