[gs-devel] Can Ghostscript stream PDF?

[Till Kamppeter]

Hi,

for turning Foomatic and the Foomatic-driven legacy printer drivers, 
especially also the built-in drivers of Ghostscript, into a Printer 
Application I want to know whether Ghostscript can stream PDF, at least 
a simple raster-only PDF like PCLm.

Printer Applications always accept Raster input formats, usually PWG 
Raster and Apple Raster. If the input is of this format, it is expected 
that the Printer Application streams the input (pass through 
immediately, allows infinite jobs) instead of spooling (like the Printer 
Application would do with PDF, read whole input file, then process and 
pass on).

So I want to know now, if I start Ghostscript and feed in a PDF file, 
would Ghostscript output each page of it as soon as the data of the page 
has completely arrived or would Ghostscript read in the full PDF before 
it starts rendering it? And how it would behave with streamable PDFs, 
like the raster-only variant PCLm?

    Till