[Linux-users] Rotation of PDF files

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Aug 15, 2007, Ben Duncan wrote:
>Hmmm ... my two cents, but since I suffer from severe O.F. syndrome these days, 

>I could be way off base.

>Never the less, some rumblings on some things I have found out over the
>past few days.

>Postscript was Adobe's answer to HP's PCL/PJL language, of which I am
>happily writing nice print filters using PCL that just flat work.

>PDF is suppose to be a direct descendant of Postscript (could be wrong
>here).

>PCL is to Postscript what terminal control is to HTML. Me, I much prefer
>the escape sequence type of things since it impacts my my O.F. syndrome
>less.

I generally prefer nice, clean, ascii code for printing, but the
world seems to have gone to bitmaps for many printers, hence the
CUPS stuff that takes at least three steps to print simple ascii
accounting reports, text->postscript->printermap.  PostScript is
the Lingua Franca of open source printing (at least for anything
that does graphics).

Ghostscript now has built-in support now for PDF, and is the tool
used by HylaFAX to convert pdf2fax.  The system I'm using now has
ghostscript-8.51.  I think I'll try ghostscript-8.60 to see if
that works better.

On the other hand, PDF is supposed to be universal, printable by
pretty much any system.  On the good side, PDF files are usually
much smaller than PostScript.

Bill
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