[Tioga-users] Fwd: Converting PDF to EPS

[Vincent Fourmond]

  Hello,

On Fri, Mar 7, 2008 at 1:41 AM, Justin D. R. Steinfadt
<jdrs at physics.ucsb.edu> wrote:
> So I've tried the pdf2ps command and I'm getting the same results.
>
>  Comparison between the PDF and the PS documents show an obvious
>  degradation in quality.  The PS document looks very blurry/hazy.

  It really shouldn't. Two questions:

  * are you using the same tool for looking at both the PDF and EPS
files ? xpdf shows graphs reasonably well, while gv's antialiasing
really doesn't do a good job there (but then, it's reasonably faster)
- I have a strong feeling this might be the problem here [1];
  * do you have pixmaps in the PDF file ? Although I don't think they
could get degraded, it is a possibility (to make sure this isn't the
case, use pdfimages to extract images from the original file, convert
it to ps and back to PDF and extract the images again; diff should
show no differences).

[1]: as far as I know, while there are at least two unrelated open
source engines for rendering PDF (ghostscript and xpdf), there is only
ghostscript that renders postscript files, so most likely anything
that displays postscript files is likely to rely on it.

  Cheers,

      Vincent