Comment 0 for bug 1476705

With my (old) postscript printer, print a single page can take many minutes on some situations. It happens with some PDF files (not all) and Firefox printing of Google map, for example. When this happens, I observed in system monitor that pdftops is running continuously. After some manual PDF -> PS conversions, I see that pdftops inflates the file size for problematic cases, but is ok for other files (size similar to the original file, or even smaller). I don't know if modern Postscript printers can handle this quickly, but it's unacceptable here and certainly not an efficient way to print those files.

So I suspect that pdftops should be fixed.

For example, I join a problematic pdf produced by Google Map in Firefox. I tried many conversions. As you can see, I get a much larger file (36 times) with pdftops. It is worse with pdf2ps (and it takes longer to process), so replace pdftops by pdf2ps is not an option for me. However, pdftocairo quickly produces an efficient file. I have the same success if I open the PDF file with Evince and print it as a Postscript file. I get a similar file if I print to PS directly from Google Map (Firefox). Of course these small PS file produced by pdftocairo, Evince of Firefox print flawlessly on my printer.

Is it possible to replace pdftops with pdftocairo? I tried with a simple script but it doesn't work.

See also Bug # 1095498 which I suspect is the same (old) thing, but I fill a new one since it doesn't seem to be printer specific.
Of course, another workaround could be to use a PCL driver but no one is available for my printer (HP Color Laserjet 2605dn).