Linearizing PDF scans

[Wayne S]

> On Aug 17, 2021, at 05:12, Liam Proven via cctech <cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On Mon, 16 Aug 2021 at 23:21, Wayne Sudol via cctech
> <cctech at classiccmp.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Out of curiosity, is there a reason you do not use Acrobat for creating
>> pdfs?
> 
> I have been making PDFs for at least 20 years now, probably more.
> AFAIK I have _never_ used Acrobat to create them. I print from
> LibreOffice to its PDF generator, or I use any random Mac OS X app as
> under that OS all apps can output PDF -- PDF is the native rendering
> format of Mac OS X.
> 
> I do not normally use Windows but I believe that most modern Win10
> apps can save as PDF.

> 
> I mostly use Linux and there is no Acrobat for Linux. The reader app
> was discontinued years ago and no longer works on most modern distros.
> With considerable effort I have managed to start it inside a Docker
> container but it's complex and difficult; normally I just use Xviewer
> or Okular.
>  
> You ask as if Acrobat were the normal or default way to make PDF
> files. I don't think that's been true for decades now.
> 
It was just a curiosity thing. 
I was in charge of making postscript files into pdf’s for a large newspaper... hundreds per night. These were used for electronic distribution to various services that served up the pdfs  on the ‘net and also for archiving purposes. I used the Unix (Solaris) version of acrobat distiller - V8.
Using that in cron scripts made it very easy to distill the many flavors of postscript.
There didn’t have to be a lot of different steps to run different programs to get proper output, Unix Acrobat was capable of doing it all. Occasionally there was a job that took took long to distill but i could fix it by using Desktop Acrobat on Win or Mac. Mac version would usually get Acrobat updates quicker than Windows but that changed about 2010 and Adobe updated Windows versions first then Mac and never Unix. V8 was the last Unix Version. I asked them why and they said people could get the same functionality from the desktop versions for $100 so they weren’t willing to pay $10,000 for the Unix version.

> P.S. Please bottom-post on mailing lists. Thunderbird, for instance,
> runs on all major OSes and talks to Hotmail/Outlook.com just fine.
> 
> 
> -- 
> Liam Proven – Profile: https://about.me/liamproven
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