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

[Valentin Petzel]

Hello David

No that does not work, you need to compile from git. You might notice that 
your generated pdf file does not in fact have transparency. This is because 
the gs version bundled with the LP webpage download is 9.21, which is very old 
(2016ish). For this transparency thing to work we need at least 9.53 I think.

As I said, pdftops/poppler is now intelligent enough to recognize that there 
all alpha channels are actually fully visible and thus ignores transparency, 
while pdf2ps/gs just assumes that there is transparency by some flag.

I have appended a pdf compiled against current git with gs 9.53.3 from debian 
sid, so you can see the actual result with transparency. Also I’ve included 
what pdftops makes of this.

So basically pdftops rasters with a resolution of 300 dpi, while gs/ps2writer 
rasters by default with 720 dpi. So to get the same quality you’d have to 
invoke pdftops with -r 720. But then the produced files are basically the same 
size.

That being said, pdftops has some additional poppler advantages, so it is no 
bad thing to use it (it generally handles fonts better for example). But I 
guess one should increase the -r parameter, because 300 dpi is not really 
sufficient for high quality printing.

But then, you probably should not convert your scores to ps anyways.

Cheers,
Valentin

alpha.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

alpha.ly
Description: Text Data

alpha-pdftops.pdf
Description: Adobe PDF document

signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part.