Created attachment 7720 [details] z.ps - The file whose images get turned to black boxes See https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/817049 The user has attached a PostScript file (generated by Poppler, attached) and if he converts this PostScript file to PDF with this command line gs -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=a.pdf -f z.ps a.pdf has black boxes instead of the images. The user has GS 9.01 and I can reproduce it with 9.04 (I think the snapshot is from July 15).
Created attachment 7721 [details] a.pdf - The output file as I get it
Downgrading severity, this has apparently been a problem for a long time, is not a regression and does not affect a commercial customer.
(In reply to comment #2) > Downgrading severity, this has apparently been a problem for a long time, is > not a regression and does not affect a commercial customer. This appears to be an Acrobat bug. Ghostscript, Jaws and the Apple PDF viewer all display the resulting PDF correctly. MuPDF, like Acrobat, displays a black rectangle but this is a known limitation of MuPDF which, in its current version, does not handle Type 3 font glyphs which use colour. It seems Acrobat suffers the same limitation at least for glyphs using colour images. It is possible that there is a pdfwrite bug here, but 3 PDF interpreters with no common heritage all give the same correct answer, Acrobat is odd man out, so I think its an Acrobat bug
The Poppler-based (AFAIK) evince also shows the black boxes, whereas (strangely enough) xpdf displays the file correctly.
Some more information for others having this problem... As https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/817049 and https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=726090 and my report https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=680639 all remark, printing from Linux Firefox and SeaMonkey to cups-pdf also triggers this bug for some people. Instead just File > Print > Print to File as PDF. Firefox+Cairo creates a PDF 1.5 file (that previews fine in all PDF interpreters I've tried), then cups/cups-pdf transforms this to PostScript and then back into PDF 1.4. (Seems a lot of work for nothing, I will look for a cups bug.) So another workaround is to hold the print job, look in /var/spool/cups/ (as root) for the input PDF file, and just use that. The problematic PDFs have black images in Linux Inkscape 0.48.1 as well as in Adobe Reader (9.4.2 for Linux, Reader X for Windows). They preview OK in Okular and Windows' Foxit Reader.