CODEWITHSUNDEEP
pdfghostscript
Mark Kasson
Mark Kasson

Reputation: 1710

Using Ghostscript to change page size from A4 and other to Letter

I recently asked this question about changing paper size and have a command that scales properly most of time:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile= $outFile -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -q -dDEVICEHEIGHTPOINTS=792 -dDEVICEWIDTHPOINTS=612 -dPDFFitPage -dFIXEDMEDIA $inFile

We need to have it generate output pages that are US Letter. I have two problem files I can post. One needs extra whitespace; the other just needs a very small rescaling but it gets a wildly different output.

The first file is an A4 file. The command scales it to a height of 792 and the width is scaled to 559.667. It's scaled accurately, but we need whitespace either on both sides or on the right. How can I modify my command (or run a second command) to do this?

The second file is 8.52" x 11.02". For this one I get an output file that is 549.127 x 709.8 pts and I don't get it at all. 0.02" is within our printing tolerances so we can let it go, but a) I'd rather have just one process b) maybe the issue isn't the small scaling adjustments and maybe it will be a problem for other files.

Upvotes: 0

Views: 3193

Answers (1)

KenS
KenS

Reputation: 31197

These, along with your previous question, are all related to the myriad different Boxes available in a PDF file, and the various ways that a PDF processor will deal with the available Boxes.

For your first file; the output of pdfwrite has a MediaBox of 612x792 but a CropBox of [26.1662903 0 585.83374 792.0] which is (of course) not Letter. Its the result of scaling A4 down to Letter and centring that scaled down area on the Letter media.

If you remove the CropBox (using a binary editor) and open the file in Acrobat you will see that the white space is evenly distributed left and right of the page.

So really its up to your printing process. Either you need to tell that process to use the MediaBox and ignore the CropBox, or have it centre the CropBox on the media when the CropBox is not the same as the media.

Your second file has a MediaBox of 684x864 which is 9.5x12 inches. However it has a TrimBox which is [33.8027 33.7217 647.533 827.028] doing the arithmetic that works out is 8.524x11.018 inches.

Clearly Acrobat (or whatever you are using to get the size) is using the TrimBox, not the MediaBox. Ghostscript uses the MediaBox by default, if you want it to use a different *Box then you haver to tell it so. Try adding -dUseTrimBox to your command line. See my answer to your previous question :-)

Upvotes: 1

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