Re: Latest lilypond git master creating PDF 1.4 files instead of 1.7

[Valentin Petzel]

Okay. Basically the problem is that conversion from PDF to PS get’s really 
complicated at some point, and results in really large PS files.

I’ve tracked down the responsible commit to be 
cf2ae39e9d93c2dcdc50afd7d0389c314898273c, which implements transparency for 
PDF. Now this seems plausible, as transparency is NOT part of the Postscript 
specification, and Adobe and GS have just added (very volatile) methods to the 
PS specification for transparency in a created PDF file.

So when we have a PDF with transparency we cannot really convert it into 
proper Postscript. Thus such a conversion appears to rasterize the entire 
page, resulting in a very large ps file (of lower optical quality) that is 
hard to render.

But this probably means that your PDF viewer does not handle PDF properly but 
instead converts the PDF to PS and displays that. That is nothing Lilypond can 
influence, apart from maybe handling transparency in a more intelligent way 
such that transparency is only used if it is called for. But the best way 
would probably be to use a proper PDF viewer.

Cheers,
Valentin

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