Caltrops - Still Life - Re: Generating pdfs with scripts

Forum Overview :: Still Life

by jeep 07/28/2006, 9:17am PDT

Fullofkittens wrote:

How hard is this to do, and what scripting language do you use?

Install Ghostscript (it's free) and then use whatever scripting language you want to run gs.

There's 10000 other ways to do it, too. If GS isn't working for you (it fucking should, but sometimes your environment may demand something else) you can try some different stuff: Adobe Acrobat Full ($$) can probably be scripted similarly. OpenOffice has a built-in PDF generator (which is, shockingly, Ghostscript) but the OpenOffice application itself can be run as a service on your computer which will then accept commands sent from Java and Python.

Mac: Macs make PDFs from any application, and always have since PDF is basically a type of encapsulated postscript. Therefore any scripting language on Mac should allow you to do this, check your faggy Mac message boards for help. It's my understanding that in the future Windows will be making PDFs the way Macs can, thanks to a business deal between MS and Adobe. That's a really good thing, I think.

Linux/BSD: If you have a spare desktop you can network, you can run Linux or whatever unix-like on it. All this postscript and text manipulation crap was developed for Unix in the first place, so Linux/BSD will respond like that technology's native environment. The base Linux install of most distros has 'CUPS' as a default printing system. There's a script that lets you create a fake printer with CUPS that just lets you print to PDF. A long time ago I set up a computer here where the user 'prints to pdf' and it emails them back the output. There's also a server version of Acrobat that does the same thing if you have tons of money and tons of users, but at that point you want to hire a professional to set you up with Framemaker anyway.

/jeep/
...surprise! There's other programs that are free and good and work fine in windows. If you install gtk+ you can run Dia (which is like Visio but will save flowcharts as UML if that's your bag) and you can run GIMP (which is like Photoshop but not quite. Still very useful, though.)