Re: scs2pdf thoughts

Hmmmm... I got a private E-mail from Tony Lambley that seems to say that
the reason our PDF's weren't searchable is that scs2ps outputs postscript
where each character is given a fixed position, instead of output it as
a string.

I'm not familiar with the internals of postscript, so I'm not sure what
would have to be done to fix this.

Your script is very helpful, though.  It should be possible to do the
exact same thing with lp5250d just by using
"outputcommand=scs2ascii|franksscript.sh"

I'll have to try that, and post my findings...

On Mon, 11 Mar 2002, Frank Richter wrote:
>
> > Ghostscript produces non-searchable PDFs.  When we were discussing
> > "ps2pdf", that's what we were talking about.  ps2pdf is a shell script
> > that comes with ghostscript, it calls gs with the appropriate
> > parms to make a PDF.
>
> I seriously doubt that ghostscript produces non-searchable PDFs all the
> time. I use HPT with lpr from out AS-400 (V4R3, also tested with V3R7)
> and ghostscript 6.50.
>
> The output is quite good and *searchable*.
>
> My filter actually looks like this:
>
> ----
> #!/bin/sh
> OUTFILE=/var/tmp/as400topdf-`date +'%Y-%m-%d'`-$$
> recode -f ibmpc..l1 | \
> enscript --no-header -p- -q -fCourier-Bold@6.6/9.4 > $OUTFILE.ps
> ps2pdf $OUTFILE.ps $OUTFILE.pdf
>
> # TODO: we should get the userid sending the job and not make
> # everything world readable.
> chmod 644 $OUTFILE.pdf
>
> rm $OUTFILE.ps
> ----
>
> The AS-400 OUTQ uses WSCST QSYS/QWPDEFAULT in order to get a simple
> ascii output without any ESC-sequences for various printer models.
>