Background:
I'm using grap(1) and pic(1) to generate some graphs and diagrams. Using groff(1) and ps2pdf(1), I'm getting nice-looking results on paper and in PDF viewers such as Preview. Unfortunately, I don't have an automated way to produce nice-looking results on the web.
I have played with some Open Source tool chains, including:
grap -> groff -> gs -> pnmcrop -> ppmtogif grap -> pic2plot
but they produce smearing and crummy-looking text. gs(1) is the culprit in the first case; I suspect that pic2plot is using the same rendering code as gs does.
Both Preview and Acrobat Pro do nice jobs of converting these graphs to JPEG format. So, I thought of using AppleScript to make them do the conversions in batch mode. Unfortunately, neither app seems to have a published Dictionary for AppleScript (and the workarounds for getting past this seem uniformly difficult).
I suspect that there are Cocoa frameworks that would let me import PDF and export JPEG, but I'd rather not go that way if I can help it.
Question:
What's the simplest way to solve this (ie, mechanically convert PDF files to JPEG (or GIF or ...) format?
-r -- email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]; phone: +1 650-873-7841 http://www.cfcl.com - Canta Forda Computer Laboratory http://www.cfcl.com/Meta - The FreeBSD Browser, Meta Project, etc. http://www.ptf.com/dossier - Prime Time Freeware's DOSSIER series
