Is there a way to use ghostscript to convert PDF to PDF/A or PDF/X? I know it can be used to convert PDF to images, but I don't know if it can be used to convert PDF/A. What parameters should I use?
This is to convert a pdf document (not pdf/a) into pdf/a:
gs -dPDFA -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dUseCIEColor -sProcessColorModel=DeviceCMYK -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1 -sOutputFile=output_filename.pdf input_filename.pdf
Hope this will help some one!
Hope this answer helps others coming from Google with the same problem:
To convert from PDF to PDFA-1b or PDFA-2b, you can use Ghostscript. I suggest you use the latest version (9.19 today).
Install it
**In Mac OS**, you may prefer to use [Homebrew][1]:
brew install ghostscript
(UPDATE: 2023-01-23. This no longer works in mac with homebrew, as versions newer than 9.19 will adamantly refuse to do the conversion, no matter what I've tried)
In Linux, some distros bring a much older version (rhel7 sports 9.07). To download a fully independent modern one-file-only ghostscript, download it directly from the site:
wget https://github.com/ArtifexSoftware/ghostpdl-downloads/releases/download/gs919/ghostscript-9.19-linux-x86_64.tgz
(UPDATE: 2023-01-23: stick to that version, newer versions won't work with the method presented below.
If the link above is broken when you try it 20 years from now, please refer to ghostscript.com and search for download section. Download the binary version, don't go for the source, unless you know what you are doing.
In Windows, I cannot help you, but if you manage to install it, the following commands will also work, if you substitute the location of files and gs executable.
Command line
(note to future editors, please don't remove formatting, as this is more readable, yet working command line)
gs-919-linux_x86_64 \
-dPDFA=1
-dNOOUTERSAVE \
-sProcessColorModel=DeviceRGB \
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-dPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1 \
-o output_file.pdf \
/path/to/PDFA_def.ps \
input_file.pdf
In Mac gs-919-linux_x86_64 will be simply gs.
Please note that output_file.pdf and input_file.pdf must be changed to the names of the output file (the converted file) and the input file (the file to be converted). /path/to/PDFA_def.ps is your copy of the file PDFA_def.ps.
-dPDFA=1 is for PDFA-1b.
-dPDFA=2 if you want PDFA-2b.
What is PDFA_def.ps?
PDFA_def.ps is some sort of template ghostscript uses to create a PDFA file. The tricky part is that, for some reason, ghostcript comes with a non-working file.
You'll need to edit PDFA_def.ps and include the path to a valid ICC (color profile) file. Download a good color profile from Adobe:
wget https://tutankhamon.acc.umu.se/mirror/archive/ftp.sunet.se/pub/vendor/adobe/adobe/iccprofiles/win/AdobeICCProfilesWin_end-user.zip
Inside that zip, find a file called AdobeRGB1998.icc, put it somewhere and put the path to that file INSIDE you PDFA_def.ps file. Note that the path should be absolute, with no quotes. Like:
/ICCProfile (/full/path/to/file/AdobeRG1998.icc) % Customize.
Here is a version of PDFA_def.ps, change PATH_TO_YOUR_ICC_FILE to the path of you AdobeRGB1998.icc.
https://gist.githubusercontent.com/weltonrodrigo/19df77833f023fbe1572168982e4b515/raw/ea86e87379d14120d7ff26f6f235ac7eeb5f5dd5/PDFA_def.ps
#danio, #imgen: Even recently released documentation pages on PDF/X (standardized Prepress requirements) and PDF/A (standardized Archiving requirments) generation were quite misleading. (Your link pointed to a v8.63 release.) In the end, it suggested that running the example commandlines using the sample PDF*_def.ps would already generated valid PDF/A and PDF/X files.
But, they do not!
Here is one of the sample commands, which by itself is correct:
gs \
-dPDFA \
-dBATCH \
-dNOPAUSE \
-dNOOUTERSAVE \
-dUseCIEColor \
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite \
-sOutputFile=out-a.pdf \
PDFA_def.ps \
input.ps
The output file will declare itself to be PDF/A (and most PDF viewers would happily go along with this), but the output file fails all real compliance tests.
The fix is easy: you need to edit your sample PDFA_def.ps (for PDF/X: your PDFX_def.ps) files to match your environments. These required edits were not clearly spelled out in older documentation versions, and the provided command suggested it would work out of the box.
Especially in case of PDF/X you MUST specifiy a valid ICC profile to use.
See also the updated documentation (current SVN trunk version) about this:
http://svn.ghostscript.com/ghostscript/trunk/gs/doc/Ps2pdf.htm#PDFA
Please note that current answers are not completely correct. You can define which level of PDF/A you want, resulting in different behaviors of the program. This one is correct:
gs -dPDFA -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sColorConversionStrategy=UseDeviceIndependentColor -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dPDFACompatibilityPolicy=2 -sOutputFile=output_filename.pdf input_filename.pdf
Please note my change from sdPDFACompatibilityPolicy to dPDFACompatibilityPolicy.
Change it to a higher number to get other versions. 1 is good if you don't need DOCINFO.
Furthermore we use the option UseDeviceIndependentColor to avoid validating issues.
If you change options here, you will most likely get a non compliant PDF/A (even if it stated differently).
You can check your pdf/a here:
https://www.pdf-online.com/osa/validate.aspx
If you're using Windows and want to create PDF/A-1b documents explicitely (PDFCreator has an output option for PDF/A-2b but not for PDF/A-1b), you just can enter the parameters Artur described above into the ui settings of PDFCreator without the ones for the document names. Start PDFCreator, choose the printer menu, then go to settings. Now, choose 'Ghostscript' from the settings list on the left side. Under 'additional ghostscript settings', enter as follows :
-dPDFA|-dBATCH|-dNOPAUSE|-dUseCIEColor|-sProcessColorModel=DeviceCMYK|-sDEVICE=pdfwrite|-sPDFACompatibilityPolicy=1
Click on 'Save', then print something from MS Word or any other application you want using the PDFCreator - it will be created in PDF/A-1b.
Greetings,
Fritz
Related
I am currently trying to add some TrueType Fonts to my current Ghostscript setup.
(Windows 10, Ghostscript 9.25, 64bit)
I am editing the Fontmap.GS file found in the folder C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.25\Resource\Init but somehow that doesn't change the behavior. Ghostscript is still substituting Arial-BoldMT with Helvetiva-BoldMT even though I have specified a font to use in that case:
/ArialMT (arial.ttf) ;
/Arial-BoldMT (arialbd.ttf) ;
/Arial-ItalicMT (ariali.ttf) ;
/Arial-BoldItalicMT (arialbi.ttf) ;
Do you know if there is a way to update the Fontmap?
(Or maybe there is another Fontmap file that is being used and I'm editing the wrong one?)
This is the shell answer I get when converting a document that uses Arial-BoldMT (not embedded):
gswin64c -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dAutoRotatePages=/None -sOutputFile=bt_c.pdf bt.pdf
GPL Ghostscript 9.25 (2018-09-13)
Copyright (C) 2018 Artifex Software, Inc. All rights reserved.
This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.
Processing pages 1 through 1.
Page 1
Querying operating system for font files...
Substituting font Helvetica-Bold for Arial-BoldMT.
Loading NimbusSans-Bold font from %rom%Resource/Font/NimbusSans-Bold... 4854008 3414088 2431224 1058145 3 done.
The font files themselves are placed in C:\Program Files\gs\gs9.25\Resource\Font
Thank you so much in advance!
In older versions of Ghostscript we did not even ship the support files for Windows, 9.25 is the first (Windows) version where these files are actually installed without extra effort from the user.
The Windows version (and in fact all versions now) defaults to using a ROM file system. That is, the support files are compiled into the executable. What that means is that Ghostscript doesn't look at the disk files, unless you tell it to.
You need to add a -I (Include) directive to tell Ghostscript to look at the modified files on disk. In your case that would be :
-IC:/Program Files/gs/gs9.25/Resource/Init
I'd suggest that you don't put the TrueType files in the Fonts folder, leave them in the Windows/Fonts folder and modify the contents of fontmap.GS so that you include the path:
/ArialMT (c:/Windows/Fonts/arial.ttf) ;
/Arial-BoldMT (c:/Windows/Fonts/arialbd.ttf) ;
/Arial-ItalicMT (c:/Windows/Fonts/ariali.ttf) ;
/Arial-BoldItalicMT (c:/Windows/Fonts/arialbi.ttf) ;
As a couple of extra notes; many font names in PDF files don't follow the names of the original TrueType font. Its not uncommon to see Arial,Bold as a font name. You can add an alias in the fontmap.GS file for that if you've already defined Arial-BoldMT:
/Arial,Bold /Arial-BoldMT ;
I'd recommend using forward slash (/) rather then backslash characters whenever specifying paths for Ghostscript. It happily uses both, converts as required to the OS version and you don't have to worry about whether you need a double backslash or not.
Not all fonts are Fonts, sometimes they are CIDFonts, you need to edit cidfmap to add those. The format of the content is different because more information is needed to construct a replacement for a missing CIDFont.
Update: I was now able to solve the problem myself by passing the custom fontmap as well as the location of the font files in the command line:
-sFONTMAP='/home/MyFonts/MyFontmap.GS' -I'/home/MyFonts/'
Like this Ghostscript loads the correct FontMap file and also knows where to search for the actual font files.
I hope this is helpful for someone!
You have to declare "rom" in the local variable of windows and put
rom = "C: \ Program Files \ gs \ gs9.50 \"
% Rom% Resource / Font / NimbusSans-Regular
equals
C: \ Program Files \ gs \ gs9.50 \ Resource / Font / NimbusSans-Regular
We are using GhostScript to compress PDF files but, using the following parameters, it ends up changing some fonts (Bookman Old Style, Garamond and Lucida Console)
-dSAFER
-dBATCH
-dNOPAUSE
-sDEVICE=pdfwrite
-dPDFSETTINGS=/ebook
-dCompressPages=false \ -dCompressFonts=false \ -dEmbedAllFonts=false \ -dSubsetFonts=false \ -dDownsampleColorImages=true \ -dDownsampleGrayImages=true \ -dDownsampleMonoImages=true \ -dColorImageResolution=200 \ -dGrayImageResolution=200 \ -dMonoImageResolution=200 \ -sOutputFile=<filename>
-f
Here you can access the before and after with an example of what I've described.
There are more examples here in this question we've asked in GhostScript forum.
So, there is any way to compress images and keep the fonts intact with GhostScript?
The 'forum' you've posted to is SourceForge, which isn't exactly a forum. Its also used only as a mirror of the Ghostscript sources, so you won't find anyone there will answer it.
What you are asking for is simply not possible, you should read this for an explanation of why its not possible.
I see that the original file has all the fonts non embedded, so when you create a new PDF file you are again producing a file which either has no fonts embedded, or a substitute embedded. Basically that's your problem right there. If you don't embed fonts then your PDF file is, fundamentally, at the mercy of the PDF processor and whatever fonts it has available to use as substitutes for the missing font. Whatever it uses will almost certainly not be the same as what you started with, which is always going to lead to problems.
If you want your PDF files to be reliably portable, then embed the fonts. While the 'original file' may look better than the processed file, it certainly doens't look right to me.
I'm trying to use Ghostscript to convert my files in PDF to PCL. I'm able to convert one file with this command:
gswin64c -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -dSAFER -sDEVICE=pxlcolor -sOutputFile=[PCLPath].pcl [PDFPath].pdf
It works fine, I think, if you see anything wrong or not needed please say me.
The question is to convert all files in a folder, I don't know how to change the command line to do that, or what I have to do, maybe a script file??
Other question is if there is someway to accelerate the process, with any options in the command line, or using Linux instead Windows, whatever.
Thanks in advance!
Greetings.
You can use Ghostscript Studio to do that.
See the image below:
I am using ghostscript 8.71 to extract text from the PDF pages.
The command I am using is:
gswin32c -q -sFONTPATH=c:\\fonts -dNODISPLAY -dSAFER -dDELAYBIND \
-dWRITESYSTEMDICT -dSIMPLE -fps2ascii.ps -dFirstPage=1 \
-dLastPage=1 input.pdf -dQUIET
And I am using <stdout> to direct the text to another file.
But the problem is some searchable text items are not extracted by Ghostscript.
Some font text is not extracted, for example: Verdana in bold characters. But Ghostscript is opening the font files.
I can upload the PDF file but here I didn't find any upload option. If any option is available let me know.
Did you also try alternative commandline tools to extract the text, such as pdftotext from the XPDF package? How do these compare?
Can you give more details about what exactly is missing in your output? Just certain types of characters, just certain fonts, just certain pages?
Also, you are mixing Linux/Unix syntax ("gs") with Windows syntax ("c:\fonts"). On Windows systems, the default location where fonts are hosted usually is c:\Windows\fonts ...
Oh, and yes: having your problematic PDF file to look at would definitely help.
Is there a way, in Linux, Windows, or preferably Mac OS X to take a bunch of PDF files and "chain them" into one "booklet" without owning Acrobat and preferably without doing this manually?
I have TexShop, MikTex and the like installed, if any of their utilities help.
ghostcript method:
gs -q -sPAPERSIZE=letter -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=out.pdf in1.pdf in2.pdf in3.pdf ...
from: How to concatenate PDFs without pain
ImageMagick method:
convert file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf out.pdf
pdftk method:
pdftk file1.pdf file2.pdf file3.pdf cat output out.pdf
I have tried several different tools and have gotten the most reliable results with the PDF toolkit, pdftk. It seems to work more consistently than trying to use gs or messing around with conversion to PostScript and back. And it avoids dealing with one image per page, which is a nuisance.
pdftk is included in Debian-based Linux distributions and perhaps others as well.
I had to recently research this and came up with the following. In the end I went with ImageMagick.
Merging is hard! http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/software/pdf-append.php
pdfjoin from the pdfjam package seems to be the standard on unix-like systems but not available on Windows
Coherentpdf is multi-platform. However licences cost up to €700
pdftk is multi-platform and open source. However it does appear to be 3 years old.
Imagemagick will merge pdfs and also generate pdfs from jpgs. I know it works on Linux and Windows.
PDFsam works using iText and Java
You can chain the "Get selected Items", "Combine PDF Pages", "Rename PDF Document" and "Move Finder Items" actions in Automator to create the desired workflow.
Have a look at Multivalent Document Tools
Failing that you can search out other tools via Freshmeat.net
I've mentioned it in the other topics and I'll mention it again: you can use the Ghostscript utilities pdf2ps and ps2pdf do it as so:
pdf2ps file1.pdf file1.ps # Convert file1 to PostScript
pdf2ps file2.pdf file2.ps # Convert file2 to PostScript
cat file2.ps >> file1.ps # Concatenate files
ps2pdf file1.ps output.pdf # Convert back to PDF
I have also used Multivalent Java based tools. It is a simple invocation of Java MultiValent main program passing in each pdf file you want to append as arguments.