Re: Distilling postscript files -- MIDRANGE-L

On Wed, 22 Nov 2006, Dan wrote:

Yep, got that!  Well, I get an extra dash: %!PS-Adobe-3.0

The %BeginProlog and %%EndProlog comments are important.

Yep, got these too!

Yep, got "%%Page".  Our format is:
%%Page: C1-003458191 4
where C1 is our form type, the 9-digit number following that is a policy
number, and the '4' is the page number.

So, then, what's involved to do this?  Are you talking RPG, Java, ???

Then you are in pretty good circumstances. Writing a post-processorshouldn't be too hard. All you really need to do is read in originalpostscript as input and then output the pages you want. In the output youwill need to include the Prolog (well, actually everything from thebeginning of the original postscript document to the %%EndProlog comment).Then output the page(s) you want. At the end of all that, output theTrailer (another special comment in the postscript: %%Trailer). Includeeverything from %%Trailer to the end of the file in your output.

You can (should) change the total number of pages (the %%Pages comment)and can also change the page numbering (%%Page comment). Note that simplychanging the %%Page comment won't change that page number that actuallyprints on the page. There isn't a standard way to do that - you wouldhave to look at the postscript code and determine how if you want to. Butchanging these comments will affect how the PDF is generated.

Once you have output your desired pages with the Prolog and Trailer youcan just feed it to ps2pdf to get your PDF file. You can probably useghostscript to do this, but I'm on linux so it is easy:


ps2pdf <input.ps> <output.pdf>

Of course you post-processor page separator program could call ps2pdfitself.


James Rich

It's not the software that's free; it's you.
        - billyskank on Groklaw