[gentoo-user] Re: PDF: convert to grayscale
(Sorry for the late replies) Matthew Summers quantumsumm...@gentoo.org writes: paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com wrote: On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 7:50 AM, Nuno J. Silva nunojsi...@ist.utl.pt wrote: Does anyone know a tool (other than ghostscript) that is able to convert a PDF (or postscript) to grayscale? [...] Use the GIMP, Luke. I have to do this all the time with forms and such. The GIMP imports PDF files nicely, and I usually print the file to PDF after I am done. Now, if you have a many page document, the GIMP will import each page as a layer which can make it a pain to have to manually print each layer as a separate pdf, but ya do what ya gotta do. I also like PDFShuffler for managing/mangling pdf files. Its in portage by the way. GIMP will make it raster, and my goal was keeping it vectorial. BTW, if you happen to, for some reason, convert pdf to raster frequently, see ImageMagick's convert, which for some output formats (at least png and jpeg) does a batch export of all pages (as separate files). It will probably be handy when the PDF has many pages. -- Nuno J. Silva gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg
[gentoo-user] Re: PDF: convert to grayscale
Paul Hartman paul.hartman+gen...@gmail.com writes: On Tue, Feb 8, 2011 at 7:50 AM, Nuno J. Silva nunojsi...@ist.utl.pt wrote: Does anyone know a tool (other than ghostscript) that is able to convert a PDF (or postscript) to grayscale? Ghostscript does this, but is unable to convert gradients and fills (they're replaced by bitmaps) which results in a too big file unless I drastically reduce quality. Are you the creator of the document and want to save the original as greyscale, or you want to convert an already existing PDF? All I have are PDFs, without any original file. If the latter I think the easy way is to use ghostscript (pdf2ps) to render it as greyscale postscript. Then you could convert the PS back to PDF if you need to. But if you already tried that, then, I don't know... From what I've been reading, it's always better to use pdftops (poppler) because pdf2ps generates lower-level stuff and also converts fonts to bitmap. But both ways, I'd end up doing the conversion in ghostscript, and that's where the problem is. -- Nuno J. Silva gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg
[gentoo-user] Re: PDF: convert to grayscale
Alex Schuster wo...@wonkology.org writes: Grant Edwards writes: On 2011-02-08, Nuno J. Silva nunojsi...@ist.utl.pt wrote: Does anyone know a tool (other than ghostscript) that is able to convert a PDF (or postscript) to grayscale? Ghostscript does this, but is unable to convert gradients and fills (they're replaced by bitmaps) which results in a too big file unless I drastically reduce quality. I don't understand what you're asking for. What sort of output format do you want (raster, vector, ???)? I think he wants the same PDF as the original file. Only in grayscale. Yeah, that's it. I ended up hacking the PDF to convert all RGB to grayscale, but even if the result was the original without colors (what I wanted), converting it to ghostscript made some text unreadable (white on white), so it was clearly not a good idea to trust it to look the same everywhere. I gave up and used the color version. This is one method to do this, but it needs Acrobat 8 Professional: http://blog.gilbertconsulting.com/2007/05/convert-color-pdf-to-grayscale.html Thanks for the link. Although I don't have Acrobat, if I ever happen to get access to it I'll probably check that feature :-) -- Nuno J. Silva gopher://sdf-eu.org/1/users/njsg
[gentoo-user] Re: PDF: convert to grayscale
On 2011-02-08, Nuno J. Silva nunojsi...@ist.utl.pt wrote: Does anyone know a tool (other than ghostscript) that is able to convert a PDF (or postscript) to grayscale? Ghostscript does this, but is unable to convert gradients and fills (they're replaced by bitmaps) which results in a too big file unless I drastically reduce quality. I don't understand what you're asking for. What sort of output format do you want (raster, vector, ???)? -- Grant Edwards grant.b.edwardsYow! Send your questions to at ``ASK ZIPPY'', Box 40474, gmail.comSan Francisco, CA 94140, USA
