Re: booklet

On Tue, Sep 14, 2010 at 10:37 AM, Felix Michel <[email protected]> wrote:

> sorry,
>
> so i failed to upload it correctly.
>
> my fault. now it should be up.
>
> cheers
>
> felix
>
> here the link again:
>
> http://community.kde.org/File:Kde_booklet.pdf
>


Hi,

it looks very nice so far.  ;-)

However, it would be an eternal pity, if this nice work was spoiled for
users by some "technical" problems. I notice it is made with "Adobe InDesign
CS3 (5.0)". Due to some ugly personal experience with some CS3/CS4 created
PDFs in the past, I think that *could* lead to problems when you try to
print it on "cheap" home printers, or when you try to otherwise process it.
Also, some (older) PDF viewers may have rendering problems with some areas
(esp. if you use transparencies and other fancy graphical design elements).

I don't have currently access to some real "PDF preflight" tools. Therefor
I'm resorting to "poor man's preflighting". (Sorry if this gmail is sent
from Windows and is HTML-formatted -- I've no idea how it arrives in your
inboxes after having passed through the mailing list filters. If it is
garbled, and if you have a real interest in what I'm talking about, just
re-apply the CLI commands I used and look yourself at the results -- they'll
work 1:1 the same on *nix after replacing 'gswin32c' with 'gs'):

C:\downloads> *pdfinfo Kde_booklet.pdf*
Creator:        Adobe InDesign CS3 (5.0)
Producer:       Adobe PDF Library 8.0
CreationDate:   09/14/10 01:01:48
ModDate:        09/14/10 01:01:52
Tagged:         yes
Pages:          7
Encrypted:      no
Page size:      419.528 x 595.276 pts
File size:      580785 bytes
Optimized:      no
PDF version:    1.4

Here's one real world problem with it. I've used "pdffonts" (like "pdfinfo"
from XPDF) to check which fonts the PDF uses, and if they are embedded or
not:

C:\downloads> *pdffonts Kde_booklet.pdf*
name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
NGRVKY+Swiss721BT-Light              TrueType          yes yes yes     21  0
QFAGAS+Anivers-Regular               Type 1C           yes yes yes     19  0
*Error: Illegal entry in bfchar block in ToUnicode CMap*
TQHQQM+Swiss721BT-LightItalic        TrueType          yes yes yes     33  0

The problem is located on page 4, specifically:

C:\downloads> *pdffonts -f 4 -l 4 Kde_booklet.pdf *
name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
*Error: Illegal entry in bfchar block in ToUnicode CMap*
NGRVKY+Swiss721BT-Light              TrueType          yes yes yes     21  0
TQHQQM+Swiss721BT-LightItalic        TrueType          yes yes yes     33  0
QFAGAS+Anivers-Regular               Type 1C           yes yes yes     19  0

As you can see by looking at each page separately, page 4 is the only one
that uses font "TQHQQM+Swiss721BT-LightItalic", it may be a problem with the
font itself. All other pages use the other two mentioned fonts only.
Re-distilling the PDF with Ghostscript and its default parameter settings
(which may re-sample some embedded image types at 72dpi resolution) succeeds
to remove the problem for me, but it has some little "side-effect" (you need
to decide if these are welcome ones or are rather un-wanted):

C:\downloads> *gswin32c -o Kde_booklet_redistilled_by_Ghostscript.pdf
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite Kde_booklet.pdf*
GPL Ghostscript 8.71 (2010-02-10)
Copyright (C) 2010 Artifex Software, Inc.  All rights reserved.
This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.
Processing pages 1 through 7.
Page 1
Page 2
Page 3
Page 4
Page 5
Page 6
Page 7

C:\downloads> *pdffonts Kde_booklet_redistilled_by_Ghostscript.pdf*
name                                 type              emb sub uni object ID
------------------------------------ ----------------- --- --- --- ---------
MPJPKX+Swiss721BT-Light              TrueType          yes yes no      19  0
CNTMXN+Anivers-Regular               Type 1C           yes yes no      14  0
IOYBEW+Swiss721BT-LightItalic        TrueType          yes yes no      35  0

Nice, all the fonts are still embedded, using the same names, and none has
suffered conversion into a different type. Now the "side effects":

C:\downloads> *pdfinfo Kde_booklet_redistilled_by_Ghostscript.pdf*
Producer:       GPL Ghostscript 8.71
CreationDate:   09/15/10 09:14:03
ModDate:        09/15/10 09:14:03
Tagged:         no
Pages:          7
Encrypted:      no
Page size:      419.528 x 595.276 pts
File size:      191791 bytes
Optimized:      no
PDF version:    1.4

In detail:

   - InDesign's signature in the metadata is gone.  ;-)
   - File size has shrinked from ~580 kBytes to ~190 kBytes

I don't see any visible difference in Acro Reader 9.3.3 on WinXP at 96dpi
screen resolution and 200% Zoom other than a smaller degradation in the KDE
logo at the top of each page. But this could be improved or kept at same
quality by adding some appropriate tweaking parameters to the Ghostscript
commandline (without much more finetuning, first try by adding
 -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress).

Cheers,
Kurt

 
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