Pros and Cons of PDF print queues?

Posted May 22, 2012 19:22 UTC (Tue) by sfeam (subscriber, #2841)
In reply to: Pros and Cons of PDF print queues? by job
Parent article: Announcing printerd

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.