Ubuntu
ghostscript package

  1. Bug #968785
  2. Comment #6

Comment 6 for bug 968785

Revision history for this message
In , Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter) wrote :

For printing on Dabian and Ubuntu GTK/GNOME-based applications (like evince) generate PDF with Cairo and send it to CUPS. CUPS calls Ghostscript to convert this PDF into the printer's native data format.

Problem is that the PDF generated by Cairo renders very slowly with Ghostscript in the printing-typical resolutions of 600dpi and more.

This is caused by pointless use of transparency also if only opaque objects are drawn and in addition, the bounding boxes of the transparency groups are always the entire page. Since Ghostscript has to allocate memory to hold the raster data for each transparency the overall memory consumption can get multiples of the memory needed for th final page's raster data, making the machine swapping to the death.

Can this be improved? PDF-based printing got standard now.

Sample bug reports:

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ghostscript/+bug/968785
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/ghostscript/+bug/668800 (comment #36)
http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=692959