Pros and Cons of PDF print queues?

Posted May 22, 2012 19:01 UTC (Tue) by job (guest, #670)
In reply to: Pros and Cons of PDF print queues? by bredelings
Parent article: Announcing printerd

What can PDF express that PS can not? On top of my head I'd say PDF Forms or embedded Flash, but how could you possibly get a printer to make sense of that?

Pros and Cons of PDF print queues?

Posted May 22, 2012 19:15 UTC (Tue) by alexl (subscriber, #19068) [Link]

What about actual transparency (alpha channels), blending operations like "over", and transparency groups.

Also, the fact that its not a general programming language, so you can't write a raytracer in a PDF is kinda nice on the server side.

Also, I think there is some metadata storage in PDF so that you can tell the printer things about how to print the document, etc.

Pros and Cons of PDF print queues?

Posted May 22, 2012 19:22 UTC (Tue) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841) [Link]

The biggest items for me are:

- PDF can handle CJK and other large font sets without the hackish and painful workarounds required in PostSCript, which was designed assuming that an 8 bit character index was all you needed.

- PDF can handle alpha channel color. The PostScript work-around for the lack of alpha-channel support is to expand all the relevant areas into bitmaps with pre-merged colors rather than carrying forward overlapping vector-based elements with transparency. This works so poorly that I hesitate to even call it a work-around.