CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pdfghostscript
Mark Kasson
Mark Kasson

Reputation: 1710

Scaling PDF file using ghostscript

Our system takes 8.5 x 11 PDF files (only) and does things to them. Sometimes customers hand us files to manipulate into the right shape. We're working to automate scaling non-standard sized PDF files into 8.5 x 11.

We've been able to handle most files we've tested with ghostscript, but we have this one customer submitted file that we are unable to handle. (And unfortunately we can't recreate the condition and, of course, can't post the customer's data.)

The file is PDF v1.7 and contains seven 8.5x11 pages followed by four pages that are 25.5 x 45.33 inches. I don't know how they were generated (Adobe Acrobat 10.1.2 per pdfinfo).

We have gradually added a series of parameters to our gs command until we arrived at this:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=$final_file -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sPAPERSIZE=letter -q -r720 -g6120x7920 -dPDFFitPage -dFIXEDMEDIA $files_to_convert

This seems to work fine for our other files, but for this ONE file, the 25.5 x 45.33 pages are not scaled to letter size. Here are the measurements for the output file's pages 7 and 8's per pdfinfo:

Page 7 size: 612 x 792 pts (letter) Page 7 rot: 0 Page 8 size: 1836 x 3264 pts Page 8 rot: 0

I've read that PostScript has Policies, PageSize options, but I'm not aware of such a thing with PDF. And if it exists, I don't know how to alter it using ghostscript.

How can I make sure all pages are scaled to letter?

Upvotes: 1

Views: 2347

Answers (1)

KenS
KenS

Reputation: 31197

Well, Ghostscript uses PostScript as its scripting language, so anything you can do in PostScript you can do to a PDF file.

I really wouldn't use -g with pdfwrite, because -g specifies pixels, and since pdfwrite is a vector device that doesn't really work well. Use DEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS and DEVICEWIDTHPOINTS instead.

Don't set -sPAPERSIZE either, you can't set the media to be letter in one place and something different (the -g switch) elsewhere.

Its not really possible to tell you what's going on exactly with your PDF file without seeing it, and you haven't really explained what's wrong. You imply that the pages are not being scaled, but you don't say what size they are being drawn at. You also don't say why you think the pages are 'legal' size when viewed in Acrobat.

If you are saying that the pages in question are 'legal' but the media is much larger, then that is entirely possible and would suggest that the pages have a CropBox. Ghostscript uses the MediaBox for page sizes, Acrobat uses a plethora of different boxes, but usually defaults to the CropBox.

If you want Ghostscript to use the CropBox then just tell it -dUseCropBox.

Alternatively post an example somewhere and I can look at it.

Upvotes: 1

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