RE: Distilling postscript files

Dan,

Perhaps you should just load Ghostscript to your iSeries PASE and use it 
natively on OS400....

Just a thought...

-----Original Message-----
From: midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:midrange-l-bounces@xxxxxxxxxxxx]On Behalf Of Dan
Sent: Friday, November 17, 2006 2:13 PM
To: Midrange Systems Technical Discussion
Subject: Distilling postscript files


(Cross-posted to Midrange-L and PCtech-L

I'm not really sure how appropriate the subject line is.  We use a software
package (DOC1) that generates postscript files on the 400.  I have no
control over the DOC1 process, I have access only to the final produced
postscript files.  One of our group's responsibilities is to produce PDF
samples of each unique form, and a single postscript file will contain
hundreds of pages with the different forms.  Currently, we are downloading
the postscript files to the PC and using Ghostview/GSView to look at the
output and generate the PDF forms.  It is an extremely labor intensive
process to produce 40-50 PDF samples and we're thinking that there simply
must be a better way.  Each PDF sample we produce has a name given it that
could be extracted from the front and back of the page we are trying to
convert.  In fact, I just tried the Text Extract function of Ghostview and
see that I could concatenate the first line of text (the form's title) to
the last line of text (the form ID) to generate the file name I need.
Because there will be duplicates generated in this naming scheme, I would
like to append a sequence number at the end of the name.  Easiest net
result, if there are 300 pages in the postscript file, I want to produce 150
PDF files, each file a front and back page.

I thought something called Acrobat Distiller might be worth looking into,
but it appears to be an obsolete product from 7 or 8 years ago.  We are
willing to look at freeware, shareware, and commercial apps.

TIA,
Dan