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Re: [Groff] pdfroff produces two copies
From: |
Keith Marshall |
Subject: |
Re: [Groff] pdfroff produces two copies |
Date: |
Tue, 4 Aug 2009 22:05:07 +0100 |
User-agent: |
KMail/1.9.10 |
On Tuesday 04 August 2009 16:17:35 brian m. carlson wrote:
> My main motivation for using pdfroff instead of plain groff -Tps
> is that ghostscript (and all the document viewers based on it)
> produces (IMO) ugly font output when viewing PostScript files in
> X, whereas poppler produces nice output for PDF. I guess I'll go
> back to piping the output of groff into ps2pdf.
Well, pdfroff effectively pipes the output from groff -Tps through
ghostscript anyway, and since ps2pdf is just a wrapper script for
ghostscript, you should see little difference.
pdfroff doesn't really offer any advantage piping groff output
directly into ps2pdf (or into ghostscript itself), unless you need
multiple pass groff processing, (e.g. to resolve references).
Earlier I wrote:
> ... its multipass processing, (required to resolve pdfmark
> references), is an expensive overhead for documents which don't
> require it.
To clarify: pdfroff initially performs a minimum of two, and more
commonly three initial groff passes on the input data, with output
suppressed, to compile a consistent reference dictionary; these may
be suppressed, by specifying the --no-reference-dictionary option.
Following these preliminary passes, a further pass is performed, to
capture the output for the TOC; this may be suppressed by specifying
the --no-toc-relocation option. A final groff pass, which cannot[*]
be suppressed, is then performed to capture the PS output for the
body of the document; this is then appended to the TOC output, the
combined stream is filtered to remove redundant pages, and the
residue is piped through ghostscript's pdfwrite output filter.
Thus, while `pdfroff --no-toc --no-ref ...' should be approximately
equivalent to `groff -Tps ... | ps2pdf -', it still incurs a setup
overhead, so really offers no advantage.
[*] Unless the --no-pdf-output option is specified; this terminates
pdfroff processing immediately after compilation of the reference
dictionary, suppressing both the TOC and body output passes, and the
following output filtering and ghostscript pdfwrite processing.
--
Regards,
Keith.
- Re: [Groff] pdfroff produces two copies, (continued)
- Re: [Groff] pdfroff produces two copies, Keith Marshall, 2009/08/04
- Re: [Groff] pdfroff produces two copies, brian m. carlson, 2009/08/04
- Re: [Groff] pdfroff produces two copies, Keith Marshall, 2009/08/04
- [Groff] gropdf driver (was: pdfroff produces two copies), Werner LEMBERG, 2009/08/04
- [Groff] Re: gropdf driver (was: pdfroff produces two copies), Deri James, 2009/08/04
- Re: [Groff] gropdf driver (was: pdfroff produces two copies), joerg van den hoff, 2009/08/05
- Re: [Groff] gropdf driver (was: pdfroff produces two copies), Deri James, 2009/08/05
- Re: [Groff] gropdf driver (was: pdfroff produces two copies), Deri James, 2009/08/06
- Re: [Groff] gropdf driver, Werner LEMBERG, 2009/08/06
- Re: [Groff] gropdf driver (was: pdfroff produces two copies), joerg van den hoff, 2009/08/06
- Re: [Groff] pdfroff produces two copies,
Keith Marshall <=