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Ghostscript: PDF total pages

I'm using Ghostscript library API (wrapping from C#) to print PDF documents from my application.
With the '-dFirstPage' and '-dLastPage' parameters I'm able to select an range of pages to be printed, but how about the total number of a PDF's pages?

It is not very nice to allow a user to select a page interval from 2 to 10 when, let me say, the PDF document has only 4 pages.

Consider that I'm using Ghostscript library through the gsapi_init_with_args API library call.

Solution

  • Ghostscript can count and display the number of pages of a PDF on stdout. The commandline is

    gswin32c ^
  -q ^
  -dNODISPLAY ^
  -c "(input.pdf) (r) file runpdfbegin pdfpagecount = quit"

    Here all the -c "..." stuff is a PostScript commandline snippet (using a few GS internal command extensions). And input.pdf is the PDF filename (could also be a full path like (c:/path/to/my.pdf)).

    However, a better and faster tool for this kind of job would be to use pdfinfo (part of the XPDF-utilities, also available on Windows).

    Update:

    @ebyrob wants to know if one can modify my example command line so that it also displays the PDF in a single operation. Try this:

    gswin32c ^
  -q ^
  -c "(input.pdf) (r) file runpdfbegin pdfpagecount =" ^
  -f input.pdf

    Well, it's not a single operation -- it's just two different operations in a single commandline.