[gs-devel] Can Ghostscript stream PDF?

[Till Kamppeter]

On 02/06/2021 16:00, Chris Liddell wrote:
> On 02/06/2021 14:43, Jonas Smedegaard wrote:
>>
>> If I understand you correctly that GhostPDL can be built _without_ PCL
>> support and there is a use-case for that, then that's interesting to me
>> and I could look into shipping such gpld runtime with Debian.
> 
> It can't be built that way *now*, I've said I'll look into supporting
> choosing inputs with configure when I have the time.
> 
> We do also hope to have an option to build the PCL interpreter with a
> cut down AGPL compliant/compatible set of fonts. This would end up with
> a not-100% compliant PCL5 implementation, but it is *relatively* rare
> (outside of custom or test suites) these days to see even PCL5 files
> that rely on the standard font set, rather than embedding fonts.
> 
> But working out what that minimal font set should and can be is going to
> take some time.
> 
> Chris
> 

Jonas, GhostPDL supports many input formats, not only PCL. See

https://artifex.com/blog/the-evolution-of-ghostpdl

Especially you can feed in PWG Raster and many different types of 
images, which all do not need any fonts at all. So creating a Debian 
package of GhostPDL even makes sense if PCL input does not work due to 
lack of included fonts. First, PCL as input is rare, probably it is much 
more made use of the other input formats. You also can tell in some 
README file that for full PCL input support the user needs to download 
some non-free fonts and from where to download them.

    Till