[2126] in Software_Announce
jpeg2ps installed in outland
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (John Hawkinson)
Sat Sep 16 17:56:19 2006
Date: Sat, 16 Sep 2006 17:56:13 -0400 (EDT)
To: software-announce@MIT.EDU
cc: bug-outland@MIT.EDU
From: John Hawkinson <jhawk@MIT.EDU>
I've installed jpeg2ps (today for Linux; Sep 6 for Solaris).
While it does what one expects, the real point
is that it uses the PostScript level 2 DCTDecode filter
(Discrete Cosine Transform), which is what the JPEG standard
uses. This means that, unlike ImageMagick's "convert,"
there is essentially no explosion in file size when
converting a jpeg to postscript with jpeg2ps.
By default (without -b) it does encode the file in the ascii encoding
(ASCII85Decode filter; 4:5 expansion), but if you use -b, it will be
smaller still (1:1, plus some headers).
It is nominally a sister tool to "lzps," Van Jacobson's ancient
utility which lempel-ziv compresses postscript files and then
uses the LZWDecode filter.
PostScript Level 3 suppors the FlateDecode filter, for decoding
gzip compression. If anyone knows of a utility to compress
postscript files with gzip and prepend the right decoding magic,
it might be nice to install that, too.
--jhawk
