🚀 go-pugleaf

Hi Thomas,

Yes, Distiller ignores both instructions, because this device is a *e-paper virtual printer*. Ghostscript follows the same behaviour.

...MaRC anToni
(][ www.femfum.com
PostScript&PDF Tool Developers
Desenvolupadors d'Eines PostScript i PDF

Do you have any documentation to point to? Something that mentions and/or describes what an "e-paper virtual printer" is and why it behaves the way it does?

PSAlter, for what this is worth, notes the value and displays it as
part of the preview title. But then it is designed for debugging;
Distiller isn't.

Aandi Inston

It would be nice to know definitively what Distiller does/does not respect in regard to setpagedevice keys. Certainly "Duplex" is meaningless, but I don't see why "NumCopies" is. So any documentation, white paper, knowledge base article, etc, that gives the ins and outs and reasons why would be welcome.

Thomas D. Greer
 <http://www.tgreer.com>

I have never seen anything written down.  It seems to me to make no
sense to process Copies. What would you want to happen? Multiplying
PDF pages?

Aandi Inston

Exactly. What other interpretation could there be, and why does that make no sense?

"The number of copies to produce, either of each page individually or of the document as a whole, depending on the value of the collate parameter..."

So

<</NumCopies 5 /Collate false>> setpagedevice showpage

should create a PDF with 5 blank pages.

Thomas D. Greer
 <http://www.tgreer.com>

>Exactly. What other interpretation could there be, and why does that make no sense?

It doesn't make much sense to me.  That is, as a programmer, I
wouldn't have done it that way.  I couldn't imagine anyone wanting it
to. I could imagine people wanting other page device parameters to
work, especially those related to separation; again, no page device.
>
>"The number of copies to produce..."

but it remains a page device parameter. Why should this one be
honoured, since there is no page device to process the request?  Page
devices are only one kind of devices that there might be - for
instance, there have long been screen preview devices which similarly
ignore page device parameters (for copies, should they open N
identical windows?) 

Anyway, it's moot arguing: it doesn't.

Aandi Inston

Mr. Greer,

Simply stated, the NumCopies and Collate keys of setpagedevice are ignored by Distiller. There is no requirement in PostScript that a device support either of these keys. Virtually all "physical manifestation" setpagedevice keys other than pagesize are ignored as well. You want five blank pages? That's simple:

showpage showpage showpage showpage showpage

- Dov

We're getting to the nitty gritty, then. Adobe doesn't consider a PDF file a "physical manifestation" of a PostScript language program, so Distiller is free to ignore those keys. Okay. Nothing I can do about that.

Of course I don't want 5 blank pages. I was giving a very simple code snippet to illustrate the principle, that indeed it would be very possible for Distiller to respond to those key values in a predictable, understandable way.