I wanted to try and manually code a PostScript file. Why? Why not. From Wikipedia, I copied and pasted their basic Hello World program for PostScript which is:
%!PS
/Courier % name the desired font
20 selectfont % choose the size in points and establish
% the font as the current one
72 500 moveto % position the current point at
% coordinates 72, 500 (the origin is at the
% lower-left corner of the page)
(Hello world!) show % stroke the text in parentheses
showpage % print all on the page
When I try to open it in GIMP, I get
Opening 'Hello World.ps' failed. Could not interpret file 'Hello World.ps'
I can use ImageMagick to convert the file
convert "Hello World.ps" "Hello World.pdf"
convert "Hello World.ps" "Hello World.eps"
The PDF opens successfully and displays 'Hello World' in Courier.
The EPS yields the same error as the PS.
Is there something wrong with the syntax of the PS file?
Are PS files just not meant to be viewed directly, and should instead be viewed in a containing format like PDF?
Is GIMP just not able to handle this particular format of PS file?
To answer your questions, one by one:
You PostScript file is completely OK.
PostScript files can be viewed directly if you use a PostScript-capable viewer. (BTW: PDF may be regarded as a 'container format' -- but it never embeds a PostScript file for 'viewing'...)
For Gimp to be able and handle PS/EPS files, you need a working Ghostscript (installation link) on your system.
The same as point '3.' is true for your convert command: ImageMagick cannot handle PS/EPS or PDF input files unless there is a functional Ghostscript installation available on the local system. This would work as a so-called 'delegate', employed by ImageMagick to handle file formats which it cannot handle itself. A delegate converts such a format into a raster file, which ImageMagick in turn can then take over for further processing.
To check for available ImageMagick delegates, run these commands:
convert -list delegate
convert -list delegate | grep -Ei --color '(eps|ps|pdf)'
Related
I have a number of svg files created with inkscape that contain text in non-standard fonts. As far as I understand, in order to have them printed I need to convert the text to paths. It seems that if I just use
convert input.svg output.pdf
the text is automatically converted to paths. Is this correct?
However my problem is with the page size. The input svg have a page size of A5, landscape. However the converted pdf seem to be cut on the right and bottom of the image by about 5% of the image width/height.
Why is that? How do I fix it?
As long as you have Inkscape on your system, ImageMagick convert actually delegates the PDF export to Inkscape. You can use it directly on the command line as
inkscape -zA output.pdf input.svg
Quote from man:
Used fonts are subset and embedded.
There are some options to manipulate the export area. -C explicitely sets the page area, -D the drawing bounding box.
You could even preserve the SVG format by using
inkscape -Tl output.svg input.svg
which would convert text to path.
Lastely, since you have to batch-process multiple files, you should open a shell with
inkscape --shell
and process all files in one go. Otherwise, startup time of inkscape would be 1-3 seconds for every file. Something like:
ls -1 *.svg | awk -F. \
'{ print "-AC " $1 ".pdf" $0 }
END { print "quit" }' | \
inkscape --shell
I'm using inkscape to produce vector figures, save them in SVG format to export them later as "PDF + Latex" much in the vein of TUG inkscape+pdflatex guide.
Trying to produce a simple figure, however, turns out to be extremely frustating.
The first figure
is an example of the figure I would like to export in the form of "PDF + Latex" (shown here in PNG format).
If I export this to a PDF figure without latex macros the PDF produced looks exactly the same, except for some minor differences with the fonts used to render the text.
When I try to export this using the "PDF + Latex" option the PDF file produced consists on a PDF document of 2 pages (again as .png here):
This, of course, does not looks good when compiling my latex document. So far the guide at TUG has been very helpful, but I still can't produce a working "PDF + Latex" export from inkscape.
What am I doing wrong?
I worked around this by putting all the text in my drawing at the top
select text and then Object -> Raise to top
Inkscape only generates the separate pages if the text is below another object.
I asked this question on the Inkscape online discussion page and got some very helpful guidance from one of the users there.
This is a known bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/1417470 which was inadvertently introduced in Inkscape 0.91 in an attempt to fix a previous bug https://bugs.launchpad.net/inkscape/+bug/771957.
It seems this bug does two things:
The *.pdf_tex file will have an extra \includegraphics statement which needs to be deleted manually as described in the link to the bug above.
The *.pdf file may be split into multiple pages, regardless of the size of the image. In my case the line objects were split off onto their own page. I worked around this by turning off the text objects (opacity to zero) and then doing a standard PDF export.
If you can execute linux commands, this works:
# Generate the .pdf and .pdf_tex files
inkscape -z -D --file="$SVGFILE" --export-pdf="$PDFFILE" --export-latex
# Fix the number of pages
sed -i 's/\\\\/\n/g' ${PDFFILE}_tex;
MAXPAGE=$(pdfinfo $PDFFILE | grep -oP "(?<=Pages:)\s*[0-9]+" | tr -d " ");
sed -i "/page=$(($MAXPAGE+1))/,\${/page=/d}" ${PDFFILE}_tex;
with:
$SVGFILE: path of the svg
$PDF_FILE: path of the pdf
It is possible to include these commands in a script and execute it automatically when compiling your tex file (so that you don't have to manually export from inkscape each time you modify your svg).
Try it with an illustration that is less wide.
Alternatively, use a wider paperwidth setting.
Is there any command line tool for Linux that will allow me to annotate a PS or PDF file with text or a particular font, color, and size with no loss of quality? I have tried ImageMagick's convert, and the resulting PDF is of pretty poor quality.
I have a template originally authored in Adobe Illustrator, and I would like to generate PDFs from it with names in certain places. I have a huge list of names, so I would like to do this in a batch (not interactively).
If anyone has any ideas I'd appreciate hearing them.
Thanks,
Carl
Another way to accomplish this would be to hack the postscript file itself. It used to be that AI files were postscript files, and you could modify them directly; I don't know if that's true anymore. So you may have to export it.
For simplicity, I assume there's a single page. Therefore, at the very end there will be a single call to showpage (perhaps through another name). Any drawing commands performed before showpage will show up on the page.
You may need to reinitialize the graphics state (initgraphics), as the rest of the document may have left it all funny, expecting showpage to clean up before anyone notices.
To place text, you'll need to set a new font (the old one was invalidated by initgraphics) measure the location in points (72 points/inch, 28.3465 points/cm).
/Palatino-Roman 17 selectfont %so much prettier than Times
x y moveto
(new text) show
To do the merging, you can use perl: emit the beginning of the document as a HERE-document, construct some text-writing lines by program, emit the tail of the document. Here's an example of generating postscript with PERL
Or you can take data from the command-line (with ghostscript) by using the -- option ($gs -q -- program.ps arg1 arg2 ... argn). These arguments are accessible to the program through an array named /ARGUMENTS.
So, say you have a nice graphic of a scary clown holding a blank sign about 1 inch wide, 3 inches tall, top left corner at 4 inches from the left, 4 inches from the bottom. You can insert this code into the ps program, just before showpage.
initgraphics
/Palatino-Roman 12 selectfont
4 72 mul 4 72 mul moveto
ARGUMENTS {
gsave show grestore 0 -14 rmoveto
} forall
Now you can make him say funny things ($gs -- clown.ps "On a dark," "and stormy night...").
I think it's better to create PDF form and fill it with pdftk fill_form in batch:
$ pdftk form.pdf fill_form data.fdf output out.pdf flatten
Form data should be in Forms Data Format (it's just XML file with field names and values specified).
Note the flatten command. It is required to convert filled form to plain document.
Another way is to create set of PDF documents "with names in certain places" and transparent background, and pdftk stamp each of them over the template:
$ pdftk template.pdf stamp words.pdf output out.pdf
I'm trying to render Pdfs pages into png files using Ghostscript v9.02. For that purpose I'm using the following command line:
gswin32c.exe -sDEVICE=png16m -o outputFile%d.png mypdf.pdf
This is working fine when the pdf crop box is the same as the media box, but if the crop box is smaller than the media box, only the media box is displayed and the border of the pdf page is lost.
I know usually pdf viewers only display the crop box but I need to be able to see the whole media page in my png file.
Ghostscript documentation says that per default the media box of a document is rendered, but this does not work in my case.
As anyone an idea how I could achieve rendering the whole media box using ghostscript?Could it be that for png file device, only the crop box is rendered? Am I maybe forgetting a specific command?
For example, this pdf contains some registration marks outside of the crop box, which are not present in the output png file. Some more information about this pdf:
media box:
width: 667
height: 908 pts
crop box:
width: 640
height: 851
OK, now that revers has re-stated his problem into that he is looking for "generic code", let me try again.
The problem with a "generic code" is that there are many "legal" formal representations of "CropBox" statements which could appear in a PDF. All of the following are possible and correct and set the same values for the page's CropBox:
/CropBox[10 20 500 700]
/CropBox[ 10 20 500 700 ]
/CropBox[10 20 500 700 ]
/CropBox [10 20 500 700]
/CropBox [ 10 20 500 700 ]
/CropBox [ 10.00 20.0000 500.0 700 ]
/CropBox [
10
20
500
700
]
The same is true for ArtBox, TrimBox, BleedBox, CropBox and MediaBox. Therefor you need to "normalize" the *Box representation inside the PDF source code if you want to edit it.
First Step: "Normalize" the PDF source code
Here is how you do that:
Download qpdf for your OS platform.
Run this command on your input PDF:
qpdf --qdf input.pdf output.pdf
The output.pdf now will have a kind of normalized structure (similar to the last example given above), and it will be easier to edit, even with a stream editor like sed.
Second Step: Remove all superfluous *Box statements
Next, you need to know that the only essential *Box is MediaBox. This one MUST be present, the others are optional (in a certain prioritized way). If the others are missing, they default to the same values as MediaBox. Therefor, in order to achieve your goal, we can simply delete all code that is related to them. We'll do it with the help of sed.
That tool is normally installed on all Linux systems -- on Windows download and install it from gnuwin32.sf.net. (Don't forget to install the named "dependencies" should you decide to use the .zip file instead of the Setup .exe).
Now run this command:
sed.exe -i.bak -e "/CropBox/,/]/s#.# #g" output.pdf
Here is what this command is supposed to do:
-i.bak tells sed to edit the original file inline, but to also create a backup file with a.bak suffix (in case something goes wrong).
/CropBox/ states the first address line to be processed by sed.
/]/ states the last address line to be processed by sed.
s tells sed to do substitutions for all lines from first to last addressed line.
#.# #g tells sed which kind of substitution to do: replace each arbitrary character ('.') in the address space by blanks (''), globally ('g').
We substitute all characters by blanks (instead of by 'nothing', i.e. deleting them) because otherwise we'd get complaints about "PDF file corruption", since the object reference counting and the stream lengths would have changed.
Third step: run your Ghostscript command
You know that already well enough:
gswin32c.exe -sDEVICE=png16m -o outputImage_%03d.png output.pdf
All the three steps from above can easily be scripted, which I'll leave to you for your own pleasure.
First, let's get rid of a misunderstanding. You wrote:
"This is working fine when the pdf crop box is the same as the media box, but if the crop box is smaller than the media box, only the media box is displayed and the border of the pdf page is lost."
That's not correct. If the CropBox is smaller than the MediaBox, then only the CropBox should be displayed (not the MediaBox). And that is exactly how it was designed to work. This is the whole idea behind the CropBox concept...
At the moment I cannot think of a solution that works automatically for each PDF and all possibly values that can be there (unless you want to use payware).
To manually process the PDF you linked to:
Open the PDF in a good text editor (one that doesn't mess with existing EOL conventions, and doesn't complain about binary parts in the file).
Search for all spots in the file that contain the /CropBox keyword.
Since you have only one page in the PDF, it should find only one spot.
This could read like /CropBox [12.3456 78.9012 345.67 890.123456].
Now edit this part, carefully avoiding to add to (or lose from) the number of already existing characters:
Set the value to your wanted one: /CropBox [0.00000 0.00000 667.00 908.000000]. (You can use spaces instead of my .0000.. parts, but if I do, the SO editor will eat them and you'll not see what I originally typed...)
Save the file under a new name.
A PDF viewer should now show the full MediaBox (as of your specification).
When you convert the new file with Ghostscript to PNG, the bigger page will be visible.
I'm aware of the pdftk.exe utility that can indicate which fonts are used by a PDF, and wether they are embedded or not.
Now the problem: given I had PDF files with embedded fonts -- how can I extract those fonts in a way that they are re-usable as regular font files? Are there (preferably free) tools which can do that? Also: can this be done programmatically with, say, iText?
You have several options. All these methods work on Linux as well as on Windows or Mac OS X. However, be aware that most PDFs do not include to full, complete fontface when they have a font embedded. Mostly they include just the subset of glyphs used in the document.
Using pdftops
One of the most frequently used methods to do this on *nix systems consists of the following steps:
Convert the PDF to PostScript, for example by using XPDF's pdftops (on Windows: pdftops.exe helper program.
Now fonts will be embedded in .pfa (PostScript) format + you can extract them using a text editor.
You may need to convert the .pfa (ASCII) to a .pfb (binary) file using the t1utils and pfa2pfb.
In PDFs there are never .pfm or .afm files (font metric files) embedded (because PDF viewer have internal knowledge about these). Without these, font files are hardly usable in a visually pleasing way.
Using fontforge
Another method is to use the Free font editor FontForge:
Use the "Open Font" dialogbox used when opening files.
Then select "Extract from PDF" in the filter section of dialog.
Select the PDF file with the font to be extracted.
A "Pick a font" dialogbox opens -- select here which font to open.
Check the FontForge manual. You may need to follow a few specific steps which are not necessarily straightforward in order to save the extracted font data as a file which is re-usable.
Using mupdf
Next, MuPDF. This application comes with a utility called pdfextract (on Windows: pdfextract.exe) which can extract fonts and images from PDFs. (In case you don't know about MuPDF, which still is relatively unknown and new: "MuPDF is a Free lightweight PDF viewer and toolkit written in portable C.", written by Artifex Software developers, the same company that gave us Ghostscript.)
(Update: Newer versions of MuPDF have moved the former functionality of 'pdfextract' to the command 'mutool extract'. Download it here: mupdf.com/downloads)
Note: pdfextract.exe is a command-line program. To use it, do the following:
c:\> pdfextract.exe c:\path\to\filename.pdf # (on Windows)
$> pdfextract /path/tofilename.pdf # (on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X)
This command will dump all of the extractable files from the pdf file referenced into the current directory. Generally you will see a variety of files: images as well as fonts. These include PNG, TTF, CFF, CID, etc. The image names will be like img-0412.png if the PDF object number of the image was 412. The fontnames will be like FGETYK+LinLibertineI-0966.ttf, if the font's PDF object number was 966.
CFF (Compact Font Format) files are a recognized format that can be converted to other formats via a variety of converters for use on different operating systems.
Again: be aware that most of these font files may have only a subset of characters and may not represent the complete typeface.
Update: (Jul 2013) Recent versions of mupdf have seen an internal reshuffling and renaming of their binaries, not just once, but several times. The main utility used to be a 'swiss knife'-alike binary called mubusy (name inspired by busybox?), which more recently was renamed to mutool. These support the sub-commands info, clean, extract, poster and show. Unfortunatey, the official documentation for these tools isn't up to date (yet). If you're on a Mac using 'MacPorts': then the utility was renamed in order to avoid name clashes with other utilities using identical names, and you may need to use mupdfextract.
To achieve the (roughly) equivalent results with mutool as its previous tool pdfextract did, just run mubusy extract ....*
So to extract fonts and images, you may need to run one of the following commandlines:
c:\> mutool.exe extract filename.pdf # (on Windows)
$> mutool extract filename.pdf # (on Linux, Unix, Mac OS X)
Downloads are here: mupdf.com/downloads
Using gs (Ghostscript)
Then, Ghostscript can also extract fonts directly from PDFs. However, it needs the help of a special utility program named extractFonts.ps, written in PostScript language, which is available from the Ghostscript source code repository.
Now use it, you need to run both, this file extractFonts.ps and your PDF file. Ghostscript will then use the instructions from the PostScript program to extract the fonts from the PDF. It looks like this on Windows (yes, Ghostscript understands the 'forward slash', /, as a path separator also on Windows!):
gswin32c.exe ^
-q -dNODISPLAY ^
c:/path/to/extractFonts.ps ^
-c "(c:/path/to/your/PDFFile.pdf) extractFonts quit"
or on Linux, Unix or Mac OS X:
gs \
-q -dNODISPLAY \
/path/to/extractFonts.ps \
-c "(/path/to/your/PDFFile.pdf) extractFonts quit"
I've tested the Ghostscript method a few years ago. At the time it did extract *.ttf (TrueType) just fine. I don't know if other font types will also be extracted at all, and if so, in a re-usable way. I don't know if the utility does block extracting of fonts which are marked as protected.
Using pdf-parser.py
Finally, Didier Stevens' pdf-parser.py: this one is probably not as easy to use, because you need to have some know-how about internal PDF structures. pdf-parser.py is a Python script which can do a lot of other things too. It can also decompress and extract arbitrary streams from objects, and therefore it can extract embedded font files too.
But you need to know what to look for. Let's see it with an example. I have a file named big.pdf. As a first step I use the -s parameter to search the PDF for any occurrence of the keyword FontFile (pdf-parser.py does not require a case sensitive search):
pdf-parser.py -s fontfile big.pdf
In my case, for my big1.pdf, I get this result:
obj 9 0
Type: /FontDescriptor
Referencing: 15 0 R
<<
/Ascent 728
/CapHeight 716
/Descent -210
/Flags 32
/FontBBox [ -665 -325 2000 1006 ]
/FontFile2 15 0 R
/FontName /ArialMT
/ItalicAngle 0
/StemV 87
/Type /FontDescriptor
/XHeight 519
>>
obj 11 0
Type: /FontDescriptor
Referencing: 16 0 R
<<
/Ascent 728
/CapHeight 716
/Descent -210
/Flags 262176
/FontBBox [ -628 -376 2000 1018 ]
/FontFile2 16 0 R
/FontName /Arial-BoldMT
/ItalicAngle 0
/StemV 165
/Type /FontDescriptor
/XHeight 519
>>
It tells me that there are two instances of FontFile2 inside the PDF, and these are in PDF objects no. 15 and no. 16, respectively. Object no. 15 holds the /FontFile2 for font /ArialMT, object no. 16 holds the /FontFile2 for font /Arial-BoldMT.
To show this more clearly:
pdf-parser.py -s fontfile big1.pdf | grep -i fontfile
/FontFile2 15 0 R
/FontFile2 16 0 R
A quick peeking into the PDF specification reveals the the keyword /FontFile2 relates to a 'stream containing a TrueType font program' (/FontFile would relate to a 'stream containing a Type 1 font program' and /FontFile3 would relate to a 'stream containing a font program whose format is specified by the Subtype entry in the stream dictionary' {hence being either a Type1C or a CIDFontType0C subtype}.)
To look specifically at PDF object no. 15 (which holds the font /ArialMT), one can use the -o 15 parameter:
pdf-parser.py -o 15 big1.pdf
obj 15 0
Type:
Referencing:
Contains stream
<<
/Length1 778552
/Length 1581435
/Filter /ASCIIHexDecode
>>
This pdf-parser.py output tells us that this object contains a stream (which it will not directly display) that has a length of 1.581.435 Bytes and is encoded ( == "compressed") with ASCIIHexEncode and needs to be decoded ( == "de-compressed" or "filtered") with the help of the standard /ASCIIHexDecode filter.
To dump any stream from an object, pdf-parser.py can be called with the -d dumpname parameter. Let's do it:
pdf-parser.py -o 15 -d dumped-data.ext big1.pdf
Our extracted data dump will be in the file named dumped-data.ext. Let's see how big it is:
ls -l dumped-data.ext
-rw-r--r-- 1 kurtpfeifle staff 1581435 Apr 11 00:29 dumped-data.ext
Oh look, it is 1.581.435 Bytes. We saw this figure in the previous command's output. Opening this file with a text editor confirms that its content is ASCII hex encoded data.
Opening the file with a font reading tool like otfinfo (this is a part of the lcdf-typetools package) will lead to some disappointment at first:
otfinfo -i dumped-data.ext
otfinfo: dumped-data.ext: not an OpenType font (bad magic number)
OK, this is because we did not (yet) let pdf-parser.py make use of its full magic: to dump a filtered, decoded stream. For this we have to add the -f parameter:
pdf-parser.py -o 15 -f -d dumped-data-decoded.ext big1.pdf
What's the size is this new file?
ls -l dumped-data-decoded.ext
-rw-r--r-- 1 kurtpfeifle staff 778552 Apr 11 00:39 dumped-data-decoded.ext
Oh, look: that exact number was also already stored in the PDF object no. 15 dictionary as the value for key /Length1...
What does file think it is?
file dumped-data-decoded.ext
dumped-data-decoded.ext: TrueType font data
What does otfinfo tell us about it?
otfinfo -i dumped-data-decoded.ext
Family: Arial
Subfamily: Regular
Full name: Arial
PostScript name: ArialMT
Version: Version 5.10
Unique ID: Monotype:Arial Regular:Version 5.10 (Microsoft)
Designer: Monotype Type Drawing Office - Robin Nicholas, Patricia Saunders 1982
Manufacturer: The Monotype Corporation
Trademark: Arial is a trademark of The Monotype Corporation.
Copyright: © 2011 The Monotype Corporation. All Rights Reserved.
License Description: You may use this font to display and print content as permitted by
the license terms for the product in which this font is included.
You may only (i) embed this font in content as permitted by the
embedding restrictions included in this font; and (ii) temporarily
download this font to a printer or other output device to help
print content.
Vendor ID: TMC
So Bingo!, we have a winner: pdf-parser.py did indeed extract a valid font file for us. Given the size of this file (778.552 Bytes), it looks like this font had been embedded even completely in the PDF...
We could rename it to arial-regular.ttf and install it as such and happily make use of it.
Caveats:
In any case you need to follow the license that applies to the font. Some font licences do not allow free use and/or distribution. Pirating fonts is like pirating any software or other copyrighted material.
Most PDFs which are in the wild out there do not embed the full font anyway, but only subsets. Extracting a subset of a font is only useful in a very limited scope, if at all.
Please do also read the following about Pros and (more) Cons regarding font extraction efforts:
http://typophile.com/node/34377 — not available anymore, but can bee seen on Wayback Machine at https://web.archive.org/web/20110717120241/typophile.com/node/34377
Use online service http://www.extractpdf.com. No need to install anything.
Even though this question is 10 years old, it is still valid and as technology changes so does a valid answer.
In searching the current answers noticed none of them note WOFF (Web Open Font Format) (W3C) (Wikipedia) which can be used to recreate the individual characters (glyphs) and display them in a web page accurately.
Using the free online web page by IDR Solutions, PDF to HTML5 (link), convert a PDF to a zip file. In the resulting zip will be a font directory of woff file types. Current Internet browsers support woff files if you were not aware. (reference) These can be examined at the online site FontDrop! (link).
WOFF files can be converted to/from OTF or TTF at WOFFer – WOFF font converter
Also the zip file from PDF to HTML5 will contain an HTML file for each page of the PDF that can be opened in an Internet browser and is one of the best and most accurate PDF translations I have found or seen.
Eventually found the FontForge Windows installer package and opened the PDF through the installed program. Worked a treat, so happy.
http://www.verypdf.com/app/pdf-font-extractor/pdf-font-extracting-tool.html
IMO easiest way to extract fonts (Windows).
PDF2SVG version 6.0 from PDFTron does a reasonable job. It produces OpenType (.otf) fonts by default. Use --preserve_fontnames to preserve "the font/font-family naming scheme as obtained from the source file."
PDF2SVG is a commercial product, but you can download a free demo executable (which includes watermarks on the SVG output but doesn't otherwise restrict usage). There may be other PDFTron products that also extract fonts, but I only recently discovered PDF2SVG myself.
One of the best online tools currently available to extract pdf fonts is http://www.pdfconvertonline.com/extract-pdf-fonts-online.html
This is a followup to the font-forge section of #Kurt Pfeifle's answer, specific to Red Hat (and possibly other Linux distros).
After opening the PDF and selecting the font you want, you will want to select "File -> Generate Fonts..." option.
If there are errors in the file, you can choose to ignore them or save the file and edit them. Most of the errors can be fixed automatically if you click "Fix" enough times.
Click "Element -> Font Info...", and "Fontname", "Family Name" and "Name for Humans" are all set to values you like. If not, modify them and save the file somewhere. These names will determine how your font appears on the system.
Select your file name and click "Save..."
Once you have your TTF file, you can install it on your system by
Copying it to folder /usr/share/fonts (as root)
Running fc-cache -f /usr/share/fonts/ (as root)