[pdftex] "Linearized hint data" problem

[rhowlett at mail.usyd.edu.au]

Quoting Reinhard Kotucha <reinhard.kotucha at web.de>:

> >>>>> "Bob" == Jennifer Howlett <rhowlett at mail.usyd.edu.au> writes:
> 
>     > An example of a problem file can be found at
>     > http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au:8000/u/maryp/m1005/t02s.pdf
> 
> It works perfectly for me.  I don't get any error message with Acrobat
> Reader 5.06 under Linux.

Which browser, may I ask? I guess that most of the srudents, for
whom the file is intended, will be using Windows with IE. I expect
that a browser that starts up Acrobat Reader as a "helper" application
rather than using a plug-in will avoid the problem.

> 
>     > A colleague of mine uses LaTeX+dvips+AFPL Ghostscript 7.04
> 
> I'm quite amazed that you had been able to produce linearized PDF
> with such an old version of gs at all.
> 
> Maybe you are better done with a newer version, the latest is 8.11.
>

Our systems people are always slow to upgrade, but I'll ask
them to. 

As far as I could see, the ghostscript developers have not made any
significant changes to pdfopt.ps for several years. Maybe I'm
wrong about this. But if it hasn't changed, then maybe upgrading
gs won't help.

> But be careful, the meaning of the option -dSAFER has been changed
> which causes some trouble with applications using gs, such as gv.
> 
> A simple workaround is to rename gs-->gs7.04, install a newer gs,
> rename it to, say gs8.11, and make gs a symlink to one of the files.
> This way you can switch between the two versions more or less
> conveniently.
> 
> BTW., you might be disappointed that there is no free tool which is
> able to linearize PDFs perfectly.  On the other hand, all the PDFs I
> couldn't print had been linearized by "professional" programs (mainly
> from Adobe).  It seems that even the inventors of linearized PDF are
> not able to provide the software needed to produce them.
>

For my own part, I use Acrobat 5.0 to optimize my pdftex-produced
pdf files, and I haven't had any complaints recently. I find that
if I forget to optimize them then when I attempt to view them
over the web, using Netscape 7.1 under Windows, I quite often
get blank pages, or just a few words showing at the top of the page.
So I've decided that optimizing with Acrobat is a good idea. But it's
a pity that it all seems so unreliable.

Bob


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