Re: [Groff] gropdf driver (was: pdfroff produces two copies)

[joerg van den hoff]

just a short feedback:

1.)
thanks!

2.)
in a first test with

groff 1.19.3
perl v5.8.8
macosX

this seems to work more or less correctly.
but with a small text sample the generated pdf was about a factor of
10 larger than that resulting from `ps2pdf' (i.e. gs). furthermore `gv'  
complained when
displaying the pdf-file:


   **** Warning:  An error occurred while reading an XREF table.
   **** The file has been damaged.  This may have been caused
   **** by a problem while converting or transfering the file.
   **** Ghostscript will attempt to recover the data.

... which Ghostscript apparently is able to do, since the display looks  
OK, but
something seems to be murky in the generated pdf...

best regards,

joerg


On Tue, 04 Aug 2009 20:58:04 +0200, Werner LEMBERG <address@hidden> wrote:

> [Deri, I hope it's OK with you that I cite from your private email to
>  me.]
>
> > 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.
>
> Some weeks ago Deri James sent me a first implementation of a gropdf
> driver; I've uploaded it temporarily to
>
>   http://groff.ffii.org/groff/gropdf/
>
> Deri writes:
>
>   [...] Its drawback is its written in perl and has a dependancy on
>   perl module Compress::Zlib (to do the Flate compression).  However,
>   despite this, you may consider it useful to have a 'native' PDF
>   driver for groff (rather than the PS -> ghostscript route).  It is
>   slower than grops but faster than grops+gs.
>
>   The archive contains bin/gropdf (which should be installed in the
>   same directory as 'grops'), /devpdf which should be installed in
>   your groff font directory, two files for the /tmac directory, and an
>   /examples directory.
>
>   NOTE: Lines 13-15 of 'gropdf' must be "hand edited" to configure for
>   your particular 'groff' setup.  Of course these paths would normally
>   be inserted by an install script.
>
>   The /devpdf directory includes the .pfa fonts required to supplement
>   the 14 PDF type 1 base fonts up to the standard 35 fonts which
>   PostScript uses.
>
>   Gropdf supports the following run switches:-
>
>   -p <papersize> (same as grops)
>   -l (landscape mode - NOT WORKING yet!!)
>   -d (debug mode - uncompressed PDF and troff output included as  
> comments)
>   -F <path to 'font' directory (same as grops
>
>
>   TO DO
>
>   Fix landscape.
>
>   Support PSPIC (and new PDFPIC).
>
>   Support some of the more common 'x ps:' commands (particularly page
>   rotation and pdf bookmarks).
>
>   There are a few troff commands not handled yet (most notably 'Da'
>   (Draw Arc) since I have not yet figured out a good way to convert to
>   Bezier Curves for PDF!).
>
>   Improve some of the algorithms used in PDF generation (unnecessary
>   context switches between GFX and text modes). Possibly implement
>   Type 1c font subsetting to reduce file sizes (also, current
>   implementation restricted to first 256 glyphs per font).
>
>   Fix bugs!!
>
>
>   Hope you enjoy it.
>
> Please test this!  I haven't found time yet to evaluate it.
>
>
>     Werner


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