[XeTeX] Printers & PDFs created by XeTeX

[Nikola Lecic]

On Tue, 24 Jul 2007 19:00:14 +0400
Evgenie Medvedev <medvedev at project7.ru> wrote:

> Nikola Lecic wrote:
> 
> > What about this?
> 
> 	Thanks, tiff2pdf looks like it does better than ImageMagick -
> nothing extra embedded at all and the extra couple of points worth of
> image dimensions that ImageMagick added also seem to be gone.

On Tue, 24 Jul 2007 16:51:44 +0200
Bruno Voisin <bvoisin at mac.com> wrote:

> Le 24 juil. 07 à 16:30, Nikola Lecic a écrit :
> 
> > What about this?
> >
> >   http://www.remotesensing.org/libtiff/
> >
> > The binaries it provides are: bmp2tiff, fax2ps, fax2tiff, gif2tiff,
> > pal2rgb, ppm2tiff, ras2tiff, raw2tiff, rgb2ycbcr, thumbnail,
> > tiff2bw, tiff2pdf, tiff2ps, tiff2rgba, tiffcmp, tiffcp, tiffdither,
> > tiffdump, tiffinfo, tiffmedian, tiffset, tiffsplit.
> 
> I can confirm the usefulness of libtiff, having used tiff2ps to  
> convert pictures from TIFF (format required by a publisher for  
> greyscale bitmaps) to EPS to PDF (required by pdfTeX and xdvipdfmx).
> 
> ImageMagick's convert is an alternative of course, but I've always  
> had problems with it: in my experience ImageMagick's output exhibits  
> a markedly "bitmapped" appearance, caused apparently by converting  
> everything to bitmaps before processing. If you master all the  
> options of ImageMagick you can probably get high-quality output by  
> employing the appropriate option flags to get a bitmap at exactly
> the required resolution. It being not my case, I've always got more  
> satisfactory output by using more specialized tools such as libbtiff.

As far as specialised software is concerned, Apsfilter (written by
Andreas Klemm) is outstandingly useful:

  http://www.apsfilter.org/

The source code of the main 'apsfilter' shell script is a contentrated
and up-to-date knowledge about the best available methods and tools for
conversion of anything to PS:

  # Supported filetypes
  #
  #    archives (print summary of various types), ASCII, BMP, data
  #    (PCL etc.), DVI, FBM, FIG, FITS, GIF, Group 3 fax, HTML,
  #    IFF ILBM, JPEG, Kodak Photo CD, MGR, MIFF, PAM/PBM/PGM/PNM/PPM,
  #    PDF, PNG, PostScript, RLE, SGI, Sketch, Sun raster, Targa, TGIF,
  #    TIFF, troff, WMF, WordPerfect graphics, XCF (gimp), X pixmap,
  #    X window dump

Apsfilter is very popular among BSD people because it provides the
maximal support for old-style BSD LPD through its capability to
process any input and pipe it to lpr; I'd say it's not very much
used outside of *BSD (because of prevalence of CUPS).

However, even if one doesn't use lpr and Apsfilter for printing, it
can simply be used to convert virtually everything to PS the best way it
can be done (in *unix, of course) and to locate equivalent *2pdf tool.

If compiled with all capabilities, Apsfilter will pull in as
dependencies a heap of useful tools (such as libtiff, tgif, libwmf,
netpbm and a huge number of PS/paper-related ones) and employ them
altogether.

Nikola Lečić