[poppler] Proper Transparency Support in pdftops

[Jason A. Donenfeld]

Dear Poppler Maintainers,

Pdftops is a great utility. So great, in fact, that recent versions of CUPS
ship with optional compile-time support for using pdftops instead of
ghostscript. Gaining the confidence of print software is no small
accomplishment, and poppler has proved itself to be a very complete and
correct pdf parser.

There is one area, however, where poppler unfortunately makes a significant
error:

    rasterize = scan->usesTransparency() || scan->usesPatternImageMask();


The PSOutputDev uses Splash to rasterize PDFs if they're found to use
transparency or patterned image masks. While this works well for some use
cases, for many other use cases, especially in printing, rasterization is
the worst of all options and is often insufficient

So I'm wondering -- is including proper support for transparency and
patterned image masks on the schedule for the immediate future? If so,
wonderful.

If not, would you consider adding a "--dont-rasterize" flag to pdftops, so
that if PSOutputDev is unable to convert without rasterization, it exits
with a known error code? This way, pdftops could be preferred, and
ghostscript might function as a fallback, for the case of a scripted
conversion utility.

Thank you,
Jason Donenfeld
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