Ghostscript very slow when trying to display the new Ubuntu-branded test page

[Till Kamppeter]

Ghostscript takes ages to render the new PDF test page template and also test pages generated with it using bannertopdf. The template probably needs optimization.

To reproduce, run

gs /usr/share/cups/data/default-testpage.pdf

Suppressing anti-aliasing via

gs -sDEVICE=x11 /usr/share/cups/data/default-testpage.pdf

makes the output reasonably fast.

Printing with high resolutions needs to be tested.

[Lars Karlitski (larsu)]

I'm pretty sure it's what Paul already suspected in bug #933489:

> 3. Each dot is being drawn a separate push stack, set matrix, moveto 0,0 four arc commands, etc. This could be optimised a bit.

Removing the dot patterns makes rendering considerably faster.

Are there any printers affected by this or is the testpage always going through poppler first (poppler seems to render it much faster)?

[Till Kamppeter (till-kamppeter)]

I did not observer any problem with printers. I observed the problem only when screen-displaying with Ghostscript using the default output device, which is "x11alpha" (antialiasing). Already the non-antialiasing "x11" produced much faster output.

In Precise we do not use Poppler as PDF renderer for printing any more. We always use Ghostscript due to its better color management support.

[Lars Karlitski (larsu)]

Thanks for the info, Till.

> In Precise we do not use Poppler as PDF renderer for printing any more. We always use Ghostscript due to its better color management support.

I'll try to fix it for precise then.