From: mbagai@arslegal.com (Morten Bagai)
Date: Thu, 4 Sep 2003 17:02:55 -0700
Subject: [Tiff] Problems with Postscript output from tiff2ps
Message-ID: <4CF632BA-DF34-11D7-B0BE-000A95854D70@arslegal.com>

Hey there,

I am using libtiff with Ghostscript on redhat 7.3 in a solution that 
automates conversion of large, group4 compressed, multi-page tiff files 
to pdf files. The way I am doing this is basically by piping outfrom 
tiff2ps into the ps2pdf utility that comes with Ghostscript. Recently, 
I have run into a problem the postscript output created by tiff2ps. 
Since our tiff files are generated by some arcane batch scanning 
program, my solution will occasionally encounter a tiff file that has a 
corrupt page or two in it. Opening the source tiff file in any tiff 
viewer works fine, and you can see that all or part of the page in 
question is 'blacked out' or munged. When tiff2ps handles a file like 
this, it will generate the postscript output without any errors but 
there is something wrong with the result as ghostscripts pdf 
interpreter chokes on it and exits with an i/o error. The resulting pdf 
file has all the pages leading up to the bad page. I tried opening the 
postscript generated by tiff2ps in Adobe Acrobat 6 Pro, and I get 
exactly the same error as with Ghostscript. This led me to try and open 
the tiff file with Acrobat and saving it as a postscript file. If use 
Acrobat's postscript output with Ghostscript the pdf generation works 
just fine, leading me to conclude that there is something wrong with 
tiff2ps' postscript output.

Here's an example of what I do on the command line:

tiff2ps -a2 /pathto/sourcefile.tif  | ps2pdf -r240 
-dProcessColorModel=/DeviceGray -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer - 
/pathto/destinationfile.pdf

My setup is the following:

libtiff version 3.5.7-2
redhat 7.3 i386
ghostscript 6.52 (but it appears this is not the issue even though i do 
plan on upgrading)

I'd be very grateful for any suggestions as to what might be going 
wrong, options to tinker with, known bugs etc. Also, I'd be interested 
in knowing if the beta version of libtiff 3.6 is supposed to fix 
anything that might impact this issue. I can provide the postscript 
files generated by libtiff and acrobat for the same file if that helps.

Thanks!

Morten


