I have created sanitized production files from two different print jobs that do not render to usable PDFs, the PDFs are damaged and unusable. These jobs started out as mainframe EBCDIC pcl and were converted to ASCII. They print perfectly in their original and converted format but GhostPCL does not. I am submitting these in order that GhostPCL might be improved upon, we probably won't be able to use it in our current project because of this issue. I marked the severity as blocker because it negates the use of this product. I was only able to get 1.40 and 1.41 to compile on my Windoze pc, if you have a Win binary of 1.51 I can test that against this issue too.
Created attachment 3784 [details] Sample PCL file from letters job
Created attachment 3785 [details] Sample PCL file from bills job
seems ok in the current release, though viewing the resulting pdf is slow in acrobat and apple preview. You can report a bug that we don't have a windows binary for 1.51 to support@artifex.com, or you can download the free Visual Studio and build it yourself.
Clear out the Customer field (reserved for licensed Artifex Software customers)
Created attachment 3808 [details] Sample PCL file converted to pdf
The attached PDF file generated from Ghostpcl 1.51 using our sample input files hangs using the most current version of Adobe reader for Windows. It would seem that 1.51 creates somewhat better output for these test files but still has critical issues to be resolved regarding how it handles the pcl in these particular jobs.
The pcl specifies many high resolution images. It is not obvious what we can do about this. Did you have a pdf from a competing pcl implementation that is more efficient?
In the Bills there are no graphics at all except the six horizontal lines created using rectangular fills. In the Letters our logo (recorded as part of the page macro) appears at the top of each page. I have converted both files using Pagetech and Lincoln and I will upload them in one rar attachment now. All of the pdfs in this attachment behave as expected.
Created attachment 3819 [details] working pdf files using Pagetech and Lincoln
There are about 170,000 rows of raster on the first page of "letters". Lincoln's performance and quality is worse than ours on a mac using preview or acrobat 8. I can't imagine why it would be different on Windows but maybe support will look at it.
will re-evaluate with current code.
With HEAD I created PDF files and they process fine. I converted both to PDF as well and Ghostscript is able to display all 45 pages of letter from the PDF at 300 dpi in 2.6 seconds. Displaying those same 45 pages directly from the PCL completes in 2.1 seconds. For the 36 pages in the 'bills' file, similar performance is seen with 300 dpi display from the converted PDF in 1.8 seconds and 1.2 seconds from the PCL.