I am building a simple script which converts the first page of a PDF into an image using Ghostscript. Here is the command I use:
gs -q -o output.png -sDEVICE=pngalpha -dLastPage=1 input.pdf
This works beautifully with some PDFs, e.g. if I convert the first page of a PDF that looks like this:
I actually get this first page as an image and there aren't any problems.
But I have noticed that with some first pages of other PDFs, like the following:
With the same gs command, after the conversion, the .png image looks like this:
The problem is that I get this extra white space on the left inside the image when I convert that page, why does GhostsScript do this? Where does that extra blank white space come from?
Most likely, your PDFs do not use identical values for /MediaBox and for /CropBox. For details about these technical terms related to a page, see this illustration from the German Wikipedia:
In other words: the /CropBox values (if given) for a PDF page determines which (smaller) part of the overall page information (which is inside the /MediaBox) the PDF viewer should be made visible to the user (or to the printer).
Solution
To determine what are the different values for all the pages of your book(s), run this command:
pdfinfo -f 1 -l 1000 -box my.pdf
To see these values just for the first page, run
pdfinfo -l 1 -box my.pdf
For Ghostscript to give the results you want, add -dUseCropBox to your command line:
gs -q -o output.png -sDEVICE=pngalpha -dLastPage=1 -dUseCropBox input.pdf
Related
I have a PDF with 200+ editable pages and need to hardcode print to PDF them into smaller PDF files (ie page 1-2, 3-8, 9, 10-11, 12-14, etc..).
Is there a way to automate this since I do this exercise each month? Right now I have to manually print each sub section one at a time.
You can use Ghostscript to copy a range of pages from a PDF file to another.
For example, to write pages 3-8 from input.pdf to output.pdf you could run the following from the command prompt, using the command line options to specify the first and last page to process.
gswin64c.exe -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dFirstPage=3 -dLastPage=8 -o output.pdf input.pdf
This command:
gs -sOutputFile=/destination/%003d.pdf \
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-dBATCH \
-dNOPAUSE \
initial.pdf
give me the error:
GPL Ghostscript 9.26: ERROR: A pdfmark destination page 10 points beyond the last page 1.
for each page, but the same command without the 003 doesn't return any error:
gs -sOutputFile=/destination/%d.pdf \
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-dBATCH \
-dNOPAUSE \
initial.pdf
You are producing each page of the input PDF file as a separate PDF file when you specify %d. Thus each destination output file only has one page.
Your input file has 'something' (could be an outline, a Link, a Dest or possibly something else) which points to page 10 in the original file. Ghostscript's PDF interpreter converts that to a pdfmark and emits it.
Now in both cases you should be emitting one file per page, so I would expect both command lines to give you an error because page 10 is, clearly, outside the range of pages in any file.
Its hard to see why %d instead of %003d doesn't give an error, I would expect that it should. However without the original PDF file to experiment with I can't tell what is going on. Your best bet, if you think this is a bug, is to open a bug report at https://bugs.ghostscript.com
You should also try the current version (9.50) the one you are using ia somewhat out of date.
Given a black and white PDF, how do I reverse the colors such that background is black and everything else is white?
Adobe Reader does it (Preferences -> Accessibility) for viewing purposes only in the program. But does not change the document inherently such that the colors are reversed also in other PDF readers.
How to reverse colors permanently?
You can run the following Ghostscript command:
gs -o inverted.pdf \
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-c "{1 exch sub}{1 exch sub}{1 exch sub}{1 exch sub} setcolortransfer" \
-f input.pdf
Acrobat will show the colors inverted.
The four identical parts {1 exch sub} are meant for CMYK color spaces and are applied to C(yan), M(agenta), Y(ellow) and (blac)K color channels in the order of appearance.
You may use only three of them -- then it is meant for RGB color spaces and is applied to R(ed), G(reen) and B(lue).
Of course you can "invent" you own transfer functions too, instead of the simple 1 exch sub one: for example {0.5 mul} will just use 50% of the original color values for each color channel.
Note: Above command will show ALL colors inverted, not just black+white!
Caveats:
Some PDF viewers won't display the inverted colors, notably Preview.app on Mac OS X, Evince, MuPDF and PDF.js (Firefox PDF Viewer) won't. But Chrome's native PDF viewer PDFium will do it, as well as Ghostscript and Adobe Reader.
It will not work with all PDFs (or for all pages of the PDF), because it is also dependent on how exactly the document's colors are defined.
Update
Command above updated with added -f parameter (required) before the input.pdf. Sorry for not noticing this flaw in my command line before. I got aware of it again only because some good soul gave it its first upvote today...
Additional update: The most recent versions of Ghostscript do not require the added -f parameter any more. Verified with v9.26 (may also be true even with v9.25 or earlier versions).
Best method would be to use "pdf2ps - Ghostscript PDF to PostScript translator", which convert the PDF to PS file.
Once PS file is created, open it with any text editor & add {1 exch sub} settransfer before first line.
Now "re-convert" the PS file back to PDF with same software used above.
If you have the Adobe PDF printer installed, you go to Print -> Adobe PDF -> Advanced... -> Output area and select the "Invert" checkbox. Your printed PDF file will then be inverted permanently.
None of the previously posted solutions worked for me so I wrote this simple bash script. It depends on pdftk and awk. Just copy the code into a file and make it executable. Then run it like:
$ /path/to/this_script.sh /path/to/mypdf.pdf
The script:
#!/bin/bash
pdftk "$1" output - uncompress | \
awk '
/^1 1 1 / {
sub(/1 1 1 /,"0 0 0 ",$0);
print;
next;
}
/^0 0 0 / {
sub(/0 0 0 /,"1 1 1 ",$0);
print;
next;
}
{ print }' | \
pdftk - output "${1/%.pdf/_inverted.pdf}" compress
This script works for me but your mileage may vary. In particular sometimes the colors are listed in the form 1.000 1.000 1.000 instead of 1 1 1. The script can easily be modified as needed. If desired, additional color conversions could be added as well.
For me, the pdf2ps -> edit -> ps2pdf solution did not work. The intermediate .ps file is inverted correctly, but the final .pdf is the same as the original. The final .pdf in the suggested gs solution was also the same as the original.
Cross Platform try MuPDF
Mutool draw -I -o out.pdf in.pdf [range of pages]
It should permanently change colours in many viewers
Later Edit
A sample file that did not reverse was one with linework only (no image) and the method needed was to save the graphics as inverted image then reuse that to build a replacement PDF, however beware converting the whole pages to image will make any searchable text just simply unsearchable pixels thus would need to be run with the OCR active on rebuild.
The two commands needed will be something like (%4d means numbers for images start output0001)
mutool draw -o output%4d.png -I input.pdf
For Linux users the folowing second pass should work easily:-
mutool convert -O compress -o output.pdf output*.png
For windows users you will for now (v1.19) need to combine by scripting or use groups
mutool convert -O compress -o output.pdf output0001.png output0002.png output0003.png
next version may include an #filelist option see https://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=703163
This is probably just a frontend for the ghostscript command Kurt Pfeifle posted, but you could also use imagemagick with something like:
convert -density 300 -colorspace RGB -channel RGB -negate input.pdf output.pdf
I use the following command to convert a PDF to EPS:
gswin32 -dNOCACHE -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -sDEVICE=epswrite -dLanguageLevel=2 -sOutputFile=test.eps -f test.pdf
I then use the following command to convert the EPS to another PDF (test2.pdf) to view the EPS figure.
gswin32 -dSAFER -dNOPLATFONTS -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dEPSCrop -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dSubsetFonts=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true -sOutputFile=test2.pdf -f test.eps
I found the text in the generated test2.pdf have been converted to outline curves. There is no font embedded anymore either.
Is it possible to convert PDF to EPS without convert text to outlines? I mean, to EPS with embedded font and text.
Also after the conversion (test.pdf -> test.eps -> test2.pdf), the height and width of the PDF figure (test2.pdf) is a little bit smaller than the original PDF (test.pdf):
test.pdf:
test2.pdf:
Is it possible to keep the width and height of the figure after conversion?
Here is the test.pdf: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45318932/test.pdf
I tried KenS's suggestion:
gswin32 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -sDEVICE=eps2write -dLanguageLevel=2 -sOutputFile=test.eps -f test.pdf
gswin32 -dSAFER -dNOPLATFONTS -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dEPSCrop -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dMaxSubsetPct=100 -dSubsetFonts=true -dEmbedAllFonts=true -sOutputFile=test2.pdf -f test.eps
I can see the converted test2.pdf have very weird font:
that is different from the original font in test.pdf:
When I copy the text from test2.pdf, I only get a couple of symbols like:
✕ ✖ ✗✘✙ ✚✛
Here is the test2.pdf: https://dl.dropboxusercontent.com/u/45318932/test2.pdf
I was using the latest Ghostscript 9.15. So what is the problem?
I just noticed you are using epswrite, you don't want to do that. That device is terrible and has been deprecated (and removed now). Use the eps2write device instead (you will need a relatively recent version of Ghostscript).
There's nothing you can do with epswrite except throw it away, it makes terrible EPS files. It also can't make level 2 files, no matter what you set -dLanguageLevel to
oh, and don't use -dNOCACHE, that prevents fonts being processed and decomposes everything to outlines or bitmaps.
UPDATE
You set subset fonts to true. By doing so the character codes which are used are more or less random. The first glyph in the document (say for example the 'H' in 'Hello World') gets the code 1, the second one (eg 'e') gets the code 2 and so on.
If you have a ToUnicode CMap, then Acrobat and other readers can convert these character codes to Unicode code points, without that the readers have to fall back on heuristics, the final one being 'treat it as ASCII'. Because the encoding arrangement isn't ASCII, then you get gibberish. MS Windows' PostScript output can contain additional ToUnicode information, but that's not something we try to mimic in ps2write. After all, presumably you had a PDF file already....
Every time you do a conversion you run the risk of this kind of degradation, you should really try and minimise this in your workflow.
The problem is even worse in this case, the input PDF file has a TrueType CID Font. Basic language level 2 PostScript can't handle CIDFonts (IIRC this was introduced in version 2015). Since eps2write only emits basic level 2 it cannot write the font as a CIDFont. So instead it captures the glyph outlines and stores them in a type 3 font.
However, our EPS/PS output doesn't attempt to embed ToUnicode information in the PostScript (its non-standard, very few applications can make use of it and it therefore makes the files larger for little benefit). In addition CIDFonts use multiple (2 or more) bytes for the character code, so there's no way to encode the type 3 fonts as ASCII.
Fundamentally you cannot use Ghostscript to go PDF->PS->PDF and still be able to copy/paste/search text, if the input contains CIDFonts.
By the way, there's no point in setting -dLanguageLevel at all. eps2write only creates level 2 output.
I used Inkscape To convert a .pdf to .EPS. Just upload the .pdf file to Inkscape, in the options to open chose high mesh, and save as . an EPS file.
I have a PDF, which I want to convert to PCL
I convert PDF to PCL using the following command:
(gs 8.70)
gswin32c.exe -q -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH \
-sDEVICE=ljetplus -dDuplex=false -dTumble=false \
-sPAPERSIZE=a4 -sOutputFile="d:\doc1.pcl" \
-f"d:\doc1.pdf" -c -quit
When I view or print the output PCL, it is cropped. I would expect the output to start right at the edge of the paper (at least in the viewer).
Is there any to way get the whole output without moving the contents of the page away from the paper edge?
I tried the -dPDFFitpage option which works, but results in a scaled output.
You are using -sPAPERSIZE=a4. This causes the PCL to render for A4 sized media.
Very likely, your input PDF is made for a non-A4 size. That leaves you with 3 options:
...you either use that exact page size for the PCL too (which your printer possibly cannot handle),
...or you have to add -dPDFFitPage (as you tried, but didn't like),
...or you skip the -sPAPERSIZE=... parameter altogether (which most likely will automatically use the same as size as the PDF, and which your printer possibly cannot handle...)
Update 1:
In case ljetplus is not a hard requirement for your requested PCL format variant, you could try this:
gs -sDEVICE=pxlmono -o pxlmono.pcl a4-fo.pdf
gs -sDEVICE=pxlcolor -o pxlcolor.pcl a4-fo.pdf
Update 2:
I can confirm now that even the most recent version of Ghostscript (v9.06) cannot handle non-Letter page sizes for ljetplus output.
I'd regard this as a bug... but it could well be that it won't be fixed, even if reported at the GS bug tracker. However, the least that can be expected is that it will get documented as a known limitation for ljetplus output...