Hi Reinhard, On Sat, Feb 10, 2007 at 09:58:12PM +0100, Reinhard Kotucha wrote:

I'm not sure that there is something wrong with the ps file and I'm not able to reproduce this with gs-8.01. However, there are problems with other versions. Some versions hang, so I had to limit CPU time in order to ba able to check with all versions I have installed.

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Curiously you get different results depending on -dNOPAUSE and -dDEBUG. I tried with gs-7.22.

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I suppose that gs is so buggy that it doesn't make sense to use it as a validator.

Maybe you get another result too if you add -dDEBUG too.

In my opinion gs is too unstable to rely on it.

yes I also got very varying results from gs, depending on version, configuration and also the output device. However, I know of another way to check whether a ps file is valid. The ps file I uploaded is probably too complex to analyze what is wrong with it. However I think the problem is that the ps doesn't contain all the needed fonts -- type3 fonts from the pdf are missing if they are used in XObject forms only. I recompiled the pdf with all fonts embedded as type1 or truetype, and then the ps is ok.

There are two ways to extract and examine Type1 fonts:

1. My Perl script xtractfonts extracts Type1 fonts from pdf files (using pdftops at the moment but should work with acroread also) and disassembles them using t1diasm. Adding Eddie's t1lint can be done easily.

2. pdftosrc can be used to extract objects from a pdf file and Hartmut successfully retrieved some fonts and disassembled them using the t1utils.

I suppose that pdftosrc can be used to extract other things too and external programs can be used for validation.

yes probably it's a good idea to extract all fonts from a pdf and check whether they are ok. I suppose this should not be hard to do using xpdf sources.

Thanh, I find http://www.sendspace.com extremely annoying.

Unless you forgot your passwd you can copy files to thanh@ms25.ath.cx/public_html and ask people to download them from http://ms25.ath.cx/~thanh .

ah, thanks for reminding me that. I will take use of it next time. Regards, Thanh