[gs-bugs] [Bug 692104] How to make ps2pdf fail instead of converting fonts to bitmaps

[bugzilla-daemon at ghostscript.com]

http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=692104

Ken Sharp <ken.sharp at artifex.com> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
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             Status|NEW                         |RESOLVED
         Resolution|                            |INVALID

--- Comment #1 from Ken Sharp <ken.sharp at artifex.com> 2011-03-29 09:07:03 UTC ---
(In reply to comment #0)

> I am running ps2pdf in a production environment and it has started silently
> converting fonts to bitmaps for some input files. If I could make it fail
> instead, my system would automatically send the hi-res input file to the
> destination, so this would be the preferred failure mode for me.
> 
> I just cannot find any way to enable this behaviour? Or any way to make ps2pdf
> tell me why these files get converted to bitmaps?

There is no way to do this (note ps2pdf is a script, you really want to
influence the behaviour of the pdfwrite device).

pdfwrite does its best to convert any incoming data into a valid PDF file,
which is why it will (rarely) render an input font into a bitmap instead of
storing it as the input font type. 

This is not a bug, its by design, in general pdfwrite will not convert to a
bitmap font, but will preserve the font, the fallback only happens when the
incoming font type cannot be preserved in a PDF file.

I notice you are using a very old version of Ghostscript (> 6 years old), the
current version is 9.01 and 9.02 will be released within the next few days. I
would suggest that you upgrade, the number of cases where pdfwrite is forced to
fall back to a bitmap are much reduced in more recent versions. This should now
only happen for fonts that were originally bitmaps, certain PCL font types, and
very rare CIDFonts.

Without an example file to look at I can't guarantee that the current version
will not convert the incoming font into a bitmap, nor can I say why a 6 years
old version of the software did so. I can say, however, that we do not render
to a bitmap without good reason, and in general users *much* prefer to get a
PDF file, rather than an error message, so I don't plan to implement this as a
feature request.

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