The attached file is damaged very badly when piped through pdfwriter (say ps2pdf). Several readers we tried (ghostscript, poppler, Adobe Reader, Apple Preview) render the original just fine but give very noticable artefacts when used on the file produced by ps2pdf. I cannot really comment on the (customer supplied) file. A preflight on Acrobat Pro 9 did not reveal any pecularities.
Created attachment 4219 [details] Original file, displays fine
Created attachment 4220 [details] file with artefacts after being processed by ps2pdf % ps2pdf input.pdf ps2pdf.pdf % gs --version 8.63
This looks like its another case of the text render mode causing problems. Much of the text is drawn with Tr 2 (fill and then stroke), apparently to increase the 'boldness' of the font because it uses the same colour for both operations. If I alter that to Tr 1 or 0 and convert then the problem disappears. To do this, select the text in Acrobat, right-click and select properties. Note that the stroke and fill colours are set. Alter the stroke colour to 'no colour'. Notice that the boldness is reduced. Convert, problem disappears. The current pdfwrite code in HEAD does a 'better' job with text rendering modes than the old code did, but its far from perfect, and faulty line widths are a known problem. Hopefully I'll get round to altering the graphics state to address this soon. See also issue #689692. I won't mark this as a duplicate, because its not quite the same problem.
Created attachment 4259 [details] Another Testcase, heavily distorted by ps2pdf I supspect this the same problem.
Created attachment 4260 [details] File 4259 after being processed with ps2pdf
*** Bug 690025 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***
This patch: http://ghostscript.com/pipermail/gs-cvs/2008-November/008772.html (revision 9196) resolves the problem. There are still issues with text rendering modes (as noted in the submission log) to be dealt with later.
Created attachment 4637 [details] output with svn 9251 - still broken Output with current svn (rev 9251, built on freebsd) is still severely distorted. I strongly vote to reopen this bug.
Created attachment 4638 [details] out.pdf The image does not match the PDF file I produce here on Windows which displays perfectly in Acrobat. The report says 'All' for the OS, so I did not (and have not) tested it on Linux or any other Unix. You do not say how you achieved the output, is this also created from freeBSD ? If so what application did you use to view the output ? I doubt there is any point in re-opening this bug in any event, the text rendering has been heavily revised over the last few weeks and has probably reached the best state it is going to until a major overhaul is completed. The file from this issue will be tested, along with all the others, as part of the testing for that work. For what its worth I have attached the PDF file I produced.
Sorry for having wasted your time on this. After I installed to /usr/local and not /usr/local/ghostscript-8.64-svn (via configure --prefix), I got the same result as You. I don't really understand why, truss did not show any open() of old library files. Anyway, I'm a happy camper now, thanks a bunch!
*** Bug 690220 has been marked as a duplicate of this bug. ***