[Poppler-bugs] [Bug 98212] pdftops output empty pdf

[bugzilla-daemon at freedesktop.org]

https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?id=98212

--- Comment #1 from clark at electrobeat.dk ---
I have been in contact with ghostscript regarding this issue and this is their
answer. Hope it could be useful :)

https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=697525

Running the PostScript file through Ghostscript gives an error "rangecheck in
--xyshow--" for me, which you seem to have neglected to mention in your report.

Adobe Acrobat Distiller gives exactly the same error.

Looks like pdftops produced a broken PostScript program, nothing *we* can do
about that for you. The PostScript contains (simplifying considerably):

(\000\015)
[6.972
0] xyshow

Each character code in the string (note its a 2 byte string, so 2 character
codes)  uses one pair of numbers from the array for positioning. Since there
are two character codes, it needs an array with 2 pairs of positions, 4
numbers. This array contains only 2, hence the rangecheck error.

It 'looks like' the poppler developers thought they could define a simple font
with 2 byte character codes (the font is created by a routine called
pdfMakeFont16), but that's not possible. You need a type 0 font or a CIDFont to
use more than a single byte code. This is, of course, caused by the fact that
the original PDF file contains a CIDFont.

So basically poppler is broken, you're opening a bug report against the wrong
product, maybe you should send it to the poppler developers.

Of course, PDF->PS->PDF is a dumb thing to do anyway, you are practically bound
to lose quality doing so. If for some strange reason you absolutely must do
this, perhaps you should consider using Ghostscript's ps2write device to
produce the intermediate PostScript file, since that actually works, though it
does produce bitmaps for the glyphs; this is what I mean when I say that the
refrying loses quality.

If I were you I would think carefully about why you are doing this multi-step
process and whether the intermediate PostScript file is actually required.

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