Re: Printing to PDF via GUI scripting
Re: Printing to PDF via GUI scripting
- Subject: Re: Printing to PDF via GUI scripting
- From: Philip Aker <email@hidden>
- Date: Wed, 12 Feb 2003 01:05:28 -0800
On Tuesday, February 11, 2003, at 03:18 PM, Michael Sullivan wrote:
Right now, we'll just use some command line options so that the
output can be redirected to a PostScript file on disk. Once there is
a PostScript file, a PDF is easily created with the ps2pdf tool
included with ESP GhostScript.
It has been my experience with ps -> pdf converters that what you end
up with, while a PDF file, isn't a very nice file. The Postscript
gets rasterized and then converted to PDF. This means that when you
zoom in on the PDF you start seeing pixels in the letters. That is
NOT the same as saving to PDF in OS X. Is this the case with the
ps2pdf you are using?
No. What you're probably thinking about is what happens on billy boxes.
They don't really have built-in PostScript handling and have to
rasterize to TIFF first. Those kinds of PDFs are also created with
MacOS X PDF screenshots and what (of course) happens when you print an
arbitrary image to PDF.
What I described is very similar to what happens when Cocoa
applications print. I'm not entirely sure of how all the underpinnings
map to unix/CUPS printing but you can call "locate PDF" in Terminal,
weed out the Acrobat Reader files and notice a few of the facilities.
In addition, there is another filter ("nstexttopdf") which appears to
be the native filter that is used instead of GhostScript ps2pdf. I
can't find any documentation for it but have tested it successfully by
stuffing in some arbitrary parameters. If anyone has an idea about how
to set up and call an 'lpr' or 'lpd' filter, I'd really like to know
about that because I think I could then streamline the method I
described into a single 'lp' call.
Cheers,
Philip Aker
http://www.aker.ca
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