Creating PostScript from *tex

Creating a PostScript file from the *tex sources can be time consuming.

The common option is to convert tex -> dvi using latex, and then dvi -> ps using a comment such as:

$ dvips -y 1200 -o main.ps -p 5 -n 3 main.dvi

In fact, traditionally it has always been tex -> dvi -> pdf.  However, latex command often gives errors and issues in including the images, such as the below:

! LaTeX Error: Cannot determine size of graphic in deployments.png (no Bounding Box)

(See here.)

Using pdflatex package avoids the issue with the images in tex to PDF conversion, but not a way to create a .dvi or .ps.

The option is to use tex -> pdf -> ps, using pdflatex and pdftops, e.g., 

$ pdftops -level3 main.pdf main.ps

which produced 18.2 MB of .ps for a .pdf of 863.6 kB.

For the same PDF,

$ pdftops -binary -level3 main.pdf main.ps

produced a ps output of 14.6 MB, the smallest size I was able to go to without making the ps unreadable.

The output ps is still not perfect, and the other packages and options provided an even worse ps.