PS2PDF(1)

NAME
ps2pdf - Ghostscript PostScript to PDF translator

SYNOPSIS
ps2pdf [ options ] input.ps output.pdf

DESCRIPTION
ps2pdf uses gs(1) to convert the PostScript(tm) file "input.ps" to the Adobe Portable Document Format (PDF) in "output.pdf."

With one exception, ps2pdf is a pretty good workalike for Adobe Acrobat(tm) Distiller(tm) 3.0. It implements "setdistillerparams" and nearly all of Distiller's compression and image downsampling options, except for LZW compression (thanks to Unisys). By default it produces PDF 1.2 output compatible with Acrobat 3.x, compressed with "deflate" (also known as "zip" or "gzip") compression; to produce PDF 1.1 output compatible with Acrobat 2.x, use the -dCompatibilityLevel=1.1 option.

The one current great shortcoming of ps2pdf is that except for the fourteen built-in PDF fonts, it converts all fonts in the PostScript file to bitmap fonts in the PDF file, and scrambles the character codes so that the output is not searchable. (Normally it produces 720dpi bitmaps, but you can change this using Ghostscript's -r option.) We intend to mostly fix this by the end of 1998.

FILES
Run "gs -h" to find the location of Ghostscript documentation on your system, from which you can get more details.

VERSION
This document was last revised for Ghostscript version 5.50.

AUTHOR
L. Peter Deutsch <ghost@aladdin.com>