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Re: Cups and Ghostscript



On Tue 12 Dec 2017 at 23:48:06 +0100, Joerg Sonnenberger wrote:
> On Tue, Dec 12, 2017 at 10:11:57PM +0100, Rhialto wrote:
> > Also, CUPS now pretty much requires cups-filters. Which in turn depends
> > on both ghostscript and poppler. That is rather a waste, two big
> > dependencies for the same thing. And I was under the impression that
> > poppler was used as a replacement for ghostscript anyway.
> 
> Not really. Poppler is generally used for processing PDFs where
> Ghostscript is primarily used for rendering Postscript (and sometimes
> PDF) to raster formats.

PDF is basically just based on a slight modification of Postscript, so
there is a big overlap between the two. A PDF file is basically a
Postscript file which builds an object tree which represents the
document and contains content streams (which are Postscript) to render
the page. So I don't agree that it isn't a waste.

Remains the problem that if you want to print postscript, you need to
install Ghostscript with the cups option, but the resulting package
conflicts with cups-filters. That isn't very practical.

On the other hand there could easily be a filter in cups-filters that
uses (plain) ghostscript to convert PS to PDF and continue with that.
But that also isn't there. (And I'm not saying that pkgsrc should add
something like that if it is messed up by upstream; but there definitely
seems a lack of coordination somewhere.)

-Olaf.
-- 
___ Olaf 'Rhialto' Seibert  -- Wayland: Those who don't understand X
\X/ rhialto/at/falu.nl      -- are condemned to reinvent it. Poorly.

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