On Thu, 2005-09-01 at 17:14 +0000, John R. Culleton wrote: > On Wednesday 31 August 2005 11:44 pm, Asif Lodhi wrote: > > Hi Scribus Developers, > > > > I know there are tools out there that convert various formats to PDF - > > I know of text2PDF, at least. I am positive there are more out there. > > The question is: do these tools produce press-ready PDFs through > > xpdflib or whatever? Alternatively, does linux's built-in pdf library > > xpdflib (or something similar - I can't recall the correct name - > > sorry!) support such Press-ready conversion?
Probably not, but GhostScript will make press-ready PDF from suitable PostScript input. It can't do all that much in the way of conversions though - it'd be interesting to see, gs able to do things like managed RGB->CMYK conversions as part of the ps2pdf process. > What would be the purpose of such a tool? The program enscript > will take a text file and print it out on a PostScript printer. > Or it could output a PostScript file or rtf file or whatever. > There are multiple formatting options within enscript. > > Once you have a Postscript file you can convert that to pdf with > the Ghostscript tool ps2pdf. But for any useful output you need > formatting by e.g., Scribus or TeX or whatever. Yep. You can, however, do that formatting programatically. There are reporting tools out there for that - one that comes to mind is ReportLab, and there are many others for various languages with various features. I'm not sure how press-oriented their output is (in the case of ReportLab, I think the answer is "not very") though. Asif, personally I'd be inclined to look at enhancing existing tools to produce output more suitable for press work. GhostScript might be a very good starting point - and if you talk to the gs folks, you might find yourself able to get many changes back into the mainline gs. -- Craig Ringer
