PostScript -> PDF conversion + PDF Indexer

[Alessandro Perucchi]

Hello everybody,

for once I have too a question! :-)

I've read the CMOD documentation which said that you must use Acrobat Distiller to create your PDF (from PostScript for example).

Now, has someone had some experience with GhostScript? Can it be used?
If yes, what needs to be done to make it compatible with CMOD PDF indexer, or is it automatically recognized?
If no, then ok, I'll check with Acrobat, but I'm quite disapointed, because the version of AIX is always really old and outdated....

Cheers,
Alessandro

[Justin Derrick]

As far as I know, most people who need to distill PostScript into PDFs use Distiller on a Windows box.  Distiller takes in the .ps file, and writes out to a .pdf in a different directory (which might be a SMB share on an AIX server).

As for Ghostscript, if it produces a valid PDF, it should be indexable by arspdoci.

-JD.

[pankaj.puranik]

Well I have seen Ghostscript being used with Anacomp.
But I don't know if that would work with CMOD.

[Alessandro Perucchi]

I will try.

My problem is that I'll need to convert millions of Postscript (with special indexing data inside) in PDF, and archive it in CMOD.
Doing such batch job on Windows... is not really what I would like to do.
And in Unix is just a piece of cake...

But Acrobat is not anymore supported on AIX (you cannot download it anymore on Adobe website...) and IBM still says that you *must* use Acrobat distiller...

I'll try and keep the community informed if GhostScript is a valid solution for CMOD, especially with PDF Indexer.

Cheers,
Alessandro

[Justin Derrick]

The great news about GhostScript is that it's open source.  If it doesn't meet your needs, you can always modify it to suit your needs and send the patches to the authors. 

If you'd like an alternative to Windows, Distiller works beautifully on the Mac, and under the pretty graphical interface, Mac OS X is 100% UNIX, so you can do NFS mounts, BASH/KSH scripting, etc.

Keep us posted!

-JD.

[Alessandro Perucchi]

Hello,

so I've finally found the time to test ghostscript with PDF Indexer... and there is no problem at all.

I've played also with CMOD 8.5 (FP1), and with the new PDF Indexer parameter INDEXMODE.
So with this parameter you can tell PDF Indexer to look into the Document Information Dictionary of the PDF, which contains the 9 following fields:

• Title
• Author
• Subject
• Keywords
• Creator
• Producer
• CreationDate
• ModDate
• Trapped

And if you add more index in this Document Information Dictionary (you can do it easily with ghostscript), then PDF Indexer just ignores them... (well to be honnest, the PDF Reference guide doesn't encourage to add new index in that Document Information Dictionary, but prefers that they are added in the Document Catalog)

So at the moment, I can see only the following possibility to use that new METADATA Indexing of PDF Indexer, and that means using these fields in an artistic way! Like -> Author = Document Type, Subject = Customer Number, ... etc...
But that's not really ideal for my taste...

So I think it would be better that IBM enhanced this mode in order to have personalized metadata index inside a PDF, somewhere in the Document Catalog, as Adobe suggested.
At the moment this is not possible, but it should/must available in the next CMOD release (or at least in the future of CMOD)

Cheers,
Alessandro