[poppler] Postscript files created with pdftops cannot be re-exported as Postscript by typesetting programs

[amartyo banerjee]

Hi,

I work for a typesetting company. We are at the moment trying to move
to a PDF-based workflow w.r.t. handling images as EPS workflow is
unreliable due to font embedding issues. We have some legacy systems
that cannot import PDF files. In those cases we use pdftops to convert
the PDF files to Postscript. The problem is that when these Postscript
files are imported into the legacy software, and then re-exported as
Postscript, the resulting file seems to be broken in some way. This
happens whether importing into 3B2, QuarkXpress or InDesign. These
programs do not have any problems with Postscript files created by
Illustrator. Direct export to PDF also works fine in these typesetting
systems. It is the export to Postscript that produces files that
flashes the images briefly and disappears in Ghostscript.

The problem occurs with poppler versions 0.18.4 and 0.12.4, and when
pdftops is invoked with any one of the 'level3sep', 'level2sep' or
'level1sep' options.

I have some sample files which show this problem. pdftops exits with
value 0 when converting these PDFs and does not display any warnings.
The resulting Postscript files look fine when viewed with Ghostscript
or any of the above mentioned programs. When it comes time to export
as Postscript using these programs, the output file is broken,
including when viewed with Ghostscript; the images briefly show-up and
disappear.

Any help in figuring out why this is so would be most welcome. Please
let me know where I can post the sample files. Is it fine to attach
them to an email posted to this list? Or should I look elsewhere to
track this down?

Amartyo