Re: [Groff] producing a booklet with groff ?

[Tadziu Hoffmann]

> I often do `ps2pdf downloaded.pdf test.pdf', yes, input is
> PDF, not PostScript,

ps2pdf is essentially "gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite", and since
ghostscript understands both Postscript and PDF it is
indeed possible to feed PDF to ps2pdf, despite the name.

> to see if test.pdf comes out smaller than downloaded.pdf if
> I'm intending to keep it.  Sometimes the savings are large.

If you're using the default settings then my guess is that
ps2pdf achieves these savings by recompressing images to
JPEG in lower quality, or even downsampling images to lower
resolution.  So you're paying for the smaller file size with
a loss in quality.

> I wonder if I'm rastering the fonts when doing this.

Probably not, and that's the funny thing.  Analogously to
ps2pdf, pstops is "gs -sDEVICE=pswrite", but while the pdfwrite
device seems to handle fonts correctly, pswrite converts text
to bitmap images (or curves, if the font size is large).


However... (doing some googling)...

It turns out there's a new ghostscript device "ps2write" (and
a corresponding "ps2ps2" script) that *does* preserve fonts.
My guess is that this device is handled internally the same
as pdfwrite, since the output syntax is very PDF-like.
Nevertheless, for hacking the Postscript file (e.g., to extract
figures, if you don't have the source) the output from this
device is still much more cumbersome than the output produced
directly by grops (or any other program which generates clean,
editable Postscript).