[poppler] Printing of certain PDF files does not work with "fit-to-page" because of wrong BoundingBox values in the PostScript

[William Bader]

> Subject: Re: [poppler] Printing of certain PDF files does not work with "fit-to-page" because of wrong BoundingBox values in the PostScript
> To: williambader at hotmail.com; stefan.brandner at gmx.at; poppler at lists.freedesktop.org
> From: ajohnson at redneon.com
> Date: Wed, 28 Oct 2015 07:33:47 +1030
> 
> On 28/10/15 04:03, William Bader wrote:
> > 
> >> To: stefan.brandner at gmx.at; poppler at lists.freedesktop.org
> >> From: ajohnson at redneon.com
> >> Date: Tue, 27 Oct 2015 23:08:54 +1030
> >> Subject: Re: [poppler] Printing of certain PDF files does not work
> > with "fit-to-page" because of wrong BoundingBox values in the PostScript
> >>
> > The problem is that the pdftops -paper option creates a
> > PageBoundingBoxes that can point to empty space instead of to the image.
> > It is not that the PageBoundingBox is too large but that it is
> > completely wrong.
> 
> Yes, I understand the current bounding box is bogus and the patch fixes
> it to ensure the bounding box does not truncate any of the page content.
> That alone is a good enough reason to apply the patch.

I agree.

> But my point is the new bounding box still does not comply with the DSC
> spec. A future version of poppler may make the bounding box "more
> correct" and as a result the CUPS fit-to-page feature will not work the
> same as it does with the current patch.


In practice, the BoundingBox should include all of the marks, but it does not need to be the smallest rectangle that covers the marks.

For example, I work on an application that places ads on newspaper pages, and if an ad makes use of white space, pdftops needs to pass the PDF CropBox (which includes the artist's white space) to the postscript.  It would break page design applications if pdftops would shrink the bounding box to the marks on the page (like the result of gs -sDEVICE=bbox).  I think that the current pdftops behavior of passing the PDF CropBox to the postscript is good.  I think that it is unlikely that an application that generates a PDF book, for example, would create a CropBox for an empty page that covered only the page number, because when you viewed the book, when you flipped to that page, you would see a giant number in the middle of the screen.  Giving every page in a book a slightly different CropBox would drive readers crazy with the constant shifting and resizing as they paged through the book.

Regards, William
 		 	   		  
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