Bug#716842: cups-filters: please compile with support for using acroread as pdftops-renderer

[David Purton <dcpurton@marshwiggle.net>]

Package: cups-filters
Version: 1.0.34-3
Severity: wishlist

Dear Maintainer,

Version 1.0.24 of cups-filters introduced the ability to use acroread
instead of ghostscript (or poppler) for converting PDF to PostScript in
the pdftops filter. Adobe Reader converts to PostScript much much faster
than GhostScript which is slow to the point of being unusable on
documents with complex transparency.

However, the path to acroread (and indeed the other renderers) is set at
build time and cannot be changed at run time. If acroread is found in
the path at build time, this is used, otherwise it's set to a zero
length string and the filter fails when specifying this option (which
can be done at run time).

I realise, that Debian does not include acroread, but it can be
installed from the deb-multimedia package which puts acroread in
/usr/bin/.

Would you consider configuring cups-filters with the
--with-acroread-path=/usr/bin/acroread option?

I realise that this is a hack, but at least acroread could be used this
way.

Thanks,

David


-- System Information:
Debian Release: jessie/sid
  APT prefers testing
  APT policy: (500, 'testing')
Architecture: i386 (i686)

Kernel: Linux 3.9-1-686-pae (SMP w/2 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_AU.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_AU.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash

Versions of packages cups-filters depends on:
ii  bc                  1.06.95-8
ii  fonts-freefont-ttf  20120503-1
ii  fonts-liberation    1.07.2-6
ii  ghostscript         9.05~dfsg-8
ii  libc6               2.17-7
ii  libcups2            1.6.2-10
ii  libcupsfilters1     1.0.34-3
ii  libcupsimage2       1.6.2-10
ii  libfontconfig1      2.10.2-2
ii  libfontembed1       1.0.34-3
ii  libgcc1             1:4.8.1-2
ii  libijs-0.35         0.35-8
ii  liblcms2-2          2.2+git20110628-2.2
ii  libpoppler19        0.18.4-6
ii  libqpdf10           4.1.0-2
ii  libstdc++6          4.8.1-2
ii  ttf-dejavu          2.33+svn2514-3

Versions of packages cups-filters recommends:
ii  colord            1.0.1-1
ii  foomatic-filters  4.0.17-1
ii  ghostscript-cups  9.05~dfsg-8

Versions of packages cups-filters suggests:
ii  foomatic-db-compressed-ppds [foomatic-db]  20130609-1

-- no debconf information