Yes, with Ghostscript, you can extract text from PDFs. But no, it is not the best tool for the job. And no, you cannot do it in “portions” (parts of single pages). What you can do: extract the text of a certain range of pages only. First: Ghostscript’s txtwrite output device (not so good) gs … Read more
First, take note that the measurement unit for PDF is the same as for PostScript: it’s called a point [pt]. 72 points == 1 inch == 25.4 millimeters Assuming you have a page size of A4. Then the media dimensions are: 595 points width == 210 millimeters 842 points height == 297 millimeters Assuming you … Read more
A precise technical definition that everyone agrees on is difficult to come up with. Informally, “thread safe” simply means “is reasonably well-behaved when called from multiple threads”. The object will not crash or produce crazy results when called from multiple threads. The question you actually need to get answered if you intend to do multi-threaded … Read more
You should add the -dFIXEDMEDIA switch: gs \ -o output.pdf \ -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \ -sPAPERSIZE=a4 \ -dFIXEDMEDIA \ -dPDFFitPage \ -dCompatibilityLevel=1.4 \ input.pdf -dFIXEDMEDIA is always required if you need to force a specific paper/page/media size and ignore the paper/page/media size specified in the document. Because PDF always has a paper/page/media size defined (PostScript might have, … Read more
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!
If you looking for a Free (as in ‘libre’) Software, Ghostscript is surely your best choice. However, it is not always easy to use — some of its (very powerful) processing options are not easy to find documented. Have a look at this answer, which explains how to execute a more detailed control over image … Read more
Here’s some additional options that you can pass when using pdfwrite as your device. According to that page if you don’t pass anything then -dPDFSETTINGS it gets set to something close to /screen, although it doesn’t get more specific. You could try setting it to -dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress which should only compress things above 300 dpi. gs … Read more
You can use one commandline with two commands (gs, convert) connected through a pipe, if the first command can write its output to stdout, and if the second one can read its input from stdin. Luckily, gs can write to stdout (… -o %stdout …). Luckily, convert can read from stdin (convert -background transparent – … Read more
I was given a 400 page pdf file with a table of data that I had to import – luckily no images. Ghostscript worked for me: gswin64c -sDEVICE=txtwrite -o output.txt input.pdf The output file was split into pages with headers, etc., but it was then easy to write an app to strip out blank lines, … Read more
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 … Read more