CSCI 6448

Object-Oriented Analysis and Design

More information on converting Postscript files to PDF

Comments from Sudipto Chakraborty

I just purchased Adobe Acrobat 4.0 from CU Bookstore which makes converting documents of many different formats to PDF a snap. The academic version of this program is priced at $105, and (like you) I'd highly recommend this program to anyone needing a lot of PDF document generation. This program integrates very well with Microsoft Office, and is ideally suited for Microsoft Word users.

Before I purchased Adobe Acrobat, I was looking for utilities to create PDF documents on the internet and I found a PostScript viewer program called GSView that allows conversion of PostScript documents to PDF. (Do a Google.com search of "ghostscript" and go to the first site). The GSView program is available in many platforms including Windows and Linux, and is distributed under the Aladdin Free Public License, which makes it sort of like a shareware and allows end users to use it free for non-commercial purposes.

I am including some relevant links below, for anyone who would like to use this program for generating PDF documents from PostScript.

Homepage of GSView

<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/index.htm>

Licensing details

<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/Readme.htm#Copyright>

<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/cvs/New-user.htm#Find_Ghostscript>

How to get GSView

<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/gsview/get36.htm>

AFPL Ghostscript (needed to run GSView)

<http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/AFPL/get650.htm>

Windows Users

Windows users, will need to install the two programs

GSView 3.6 (~1.4 MB) and AFPL GhostScript 6.50 (~5.8 MB). The document first needs to be converted to PostScript following the methods mentioned in the class webpage. It can then be opened in GSView and "Saved As" a PDF document.

Comments from Nathan Blair

I don't know how much further you're wanting to take the whole bit about creating postscript/PDF files (without people bothering you for support too much), but you can create PDF from postscript without Acrobat. In most modern TeX distributions (including MikTeX for windows) there is a program called ps2pdf, which takes .ps files as input and produces .pdf files. I haven't used it a lot, but it seems to work fine for me. As an added bonus, it is available on the CU computers:

bfs.cs.colorado.edu:/tools/cs/ghostscript/bin/ps2pdf