The issue has been discussed with cairo upstreams on IRC, to summarize:
- the printed pdf is displayed correctly in evince or acroread which seems to indicate it's correct (they don't have better validation tool and didn't spot something wrong from a look to the file either)
- the fact that gs breaks on it is considered a gs bug
- they are happy to fix cairo issues if somebody can point what is incorrect in the pdf written
cairo 1.8.8 is also known to not deal in an efficient way with images in pdf which create slowness issues but that should be fixed in git
The issue has been discussed with cairo upstreams on IRC, to summarize:
- the printed pdf is displayed correctly in evince or acroread which seems to indicate it's correct (they don't have better validation tool and didn't spot something wrong from a look to the file either)
- the fact that gs breaks on it is considered a gs bug
- they are happy to fix cairo issues if somebody can point what is incorrect in the pdf written
cairo 1.8.8 is also known to not deal in an efficient way with images in pdf which create slowness issues but that should be fixed in git