[ltp] What is the fastest Thinkpad I can get now? (now OT)

[John Jason Jordan]

On Tue, 23 Mar 2010 05:41:02 +0000 (GMT)
Richard <rn214@hermes.cam.ac.uk> dijo:

>>>
>>>> Here is an example of my problem: I am currently trying to print a
>>>> PDF to a PS file from Evince. The PDF is 118 pages. I started it 15
>>>> minutes ago and it has completed 15 pages.
>
>
>Ugh! That's quite slow. Just a thought: have you tried using any of
>the command-line utils such as pdf2ps and friends (psutils, pdfutils).
>Also, sometimes it's much faster to break these big jobs up into pages.
>
>Also, might I ask why you're doing PDF -> PS in a PDF viewer?

Because pdf2ps puked up the PDF that I exported from Scribus.

>Most programs that speak postscript can speak PDF, so couldn't you
>handle the PDF directly? Or generate the PS file from the application
>that emitted the original PDF.

The document was created in Scribus. The document contains several
pages with transparency. Scribus cannot print transparency to any
printer, including printing to file. The only way to flatten the
transparency is to export as PDF 1.4 or 1.5. But when Scribus exports
as PDF 1.4 or 1.5 the resulting file prints glacially slow to laser
printers. 

The solution is to convert the PDF to something else. Ideally I could
just convert to PS and then print the PS with lpr. I did that with the
current file and the PS printed almost as slow as the original PDF
exported from Scribus. So the process I ended up using was to print to
PDF, print to PS from Evince (which didn't puke up the file), then
convert back to PDF with ps2pdf. The resulting PDF is only 5 MB
compared to 203 MB for the original PDF exported from Scribus. Yet it
prints perfectly, and at the full rated speed of the printer.

>How big is your original file? i.e. is it an A3 book in full high-res 
>colour, or something more akin to a regular "document"?

A more interesting question is why Scribus created a 203 MB PDF file
when apparently 5 MB was all that was necessary.