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by noir_lord 1425 days ago
Many years ago I worked in print (mostly RGB to CMYK stuff, small run) and the very expensive RIP software chocked on what seemed like every PDF a customer supplied.

I ended up with a fairly large set of shell scripts over Ghostscript to convert them into high DPI tif's to be able to reliably print them, it worked remarkably well considering that one was open source and free and the other was 1000's per license.
1 comments
hnick 1425 days ago
Yeah you just moved the RIP upstream, rasterize before the rasterizer :) We did that for a few jobs that caused trouble.

I haven't worked on the innards of those machines but my suspicion is that it's a combination of 1) Not much RAM, to keep costs down, 2) An inability to handle a large number of resources i.e. no swapping out to slow storage on a least-recently-used principle or similar, and 3) extremely strict conformance to avoid surprises in output.

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