From what I see pdftops appears to be intelligent enough to rasterize the file only if it does actually contain transparency. If it does it uses a much less smooth rasterization that is probably not fit for printing, so be careful with this! See the attached picture for a comparisation, the left one is poppler (pdftops), the right one gs (pdf2ps).
Thus poppler will produce much smaller files that are easier to render (and if there is no transparency poppler will not do any rasterisation), but it rasterizes to a quite bad resolution (though this can probably be adjusted, but that removes the advantage). But anyway. Usually there should not be any reason to convert from pdf to ps, apart from printing or doing ps-style manipulations. But ps is only a subset of pdf, so the conversion in that direction cannot always be done in an acceptable manner. Also I have tested gv on the pdf-files, but I’m not experiencing these delays. Cheers, Valentin
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