Introduction

You do not want to read introductionary blah-blah? Have Ghostscript and other tools already installed? Want to immediately dive into the thick of PDF KungFoo? Read immediately a chapter with the real stuff? Then you could click to jump to…

This book is still “work in progress”. It summarizes some of the practical solutions I applied to real-world problems encountered by my clients.

Most of the book’s chapters deal with Ghostscript commands. But sometimes I also refer to other helper utilities, which I employ when Ghostscript isn’t the right tool for the job.

Each chapter is intended to be of immediate practical value, and each one can stand on its own, giving the reader a basic or more advanced “recipe” that can be applied and adapted to his own situation, while at the same time giving additional background information and highlighting technical concepts in context.

While this book is still work in progress, readers are encouraged to submit their own suggestions and questions about topics to be included into the final version.

My experience in the prepress world and in the printing industry spans over 2 decades. To date, I’ve used Ghostscript and other Free Software tools for more than 15 years. Most of the ‘problems’ and practical tasks I describe here have been posed to me…

  • …either from paying customers, whom I helped through consulting, troubleshooting, training or software development activities,
  • …or from emails I received (sometimes from people I have not heard of before or after) asking me some particular question about a problem,
  • …or via some public internet forum, newsgroup or platform where people ask IT- or programming related questions, most prominently on StackOverflow.com.

Luckily I kept a record of the most interesting and of the most commonly asked things.

What you can read here is a condensed summary from my archives. Sometimes I didn’t write paragraphs completely from scratch, but copied them straight from my old mails. So, if you come across some sentence in the “Question” or the “Answer” section of the coming chapters which sounds familiar to you: maybe it’s because you sent me the question before, or because you received the same answer from me years ago. Over time, I may decide to edit, polish and straighten many of the original, still “raw” pieces in this book. However, this may also depend on readers’ general feedback.

Be warned though: this document is not necessarily a comprehensive, systematic tutorial! Some of the snippets explained in different chapters may be duplicates and therefor could be seen as redundant. However, should you end up reading and working through all chapters of the booklet, you’ll remember these parts better and you may have gained a rather complete picture of Ghostscript’s capabilities :-)

While I didn’t do a precise count: I’m pretty sure that a newbie Ghostscript user will easily find 100 different pieces of practical Ghostscript usage snippets here, even if the book currently does not (yet) contain 100 distinct chapters. Experienced users will also be able to find one or the other ‘gem of wisdom’.

All in all I hope you’ll find my ‘PDF-KungFoo – 100 Tips + Tricks for Ghostscript & Co.’ useful. I intend to expand and update this document over time. Readers will be entitled to free updates. So I hope, in a year or two, you will have a document which could rather be named ‘100 Chapters with 1000 Tipps + Tricks for Ghostscript & Co.’

      * – Kurt Pfeifle

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1 Downloading the tools