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Convert subset of postscript file to pdf documents

I have a system that generates large quantities of PostScript files that each contain multiple, multi-page documents. I want to write a script that takes these large PostScript documents and outputs multiple PDF documents from each.

For example one postscript file contains 200 letters to customers, each of which is 10 pages long. This postscript file contains 2000 pages. I want to output from this 1 ps document, 200x 10 page PDFs, one for each customer.

I'm thinking GhostScript is the way to go for this level of document manipulation but I'm not sure the best way to go - Is there a function in GhostScript to take 'pages 1-10' of the input ps file? Do I have to output the entire ps file as 2000 separate ps files (1 per page) then combine them back together again?

Or is there a much simpler way of acheiving my goal with something other than GhostScript?

Many Thanks,
Ben

Solution

  • Well, you might first make the PS into a PDF object collection (or directly generate a PDF from GhostScript by printing to the PDFWriter device), and then "cut" from the big PDF using pdftk, which would be quite fast.