[PLUG] ps2ascii not working: GS-8.63

Carlos Konstanski ckonstanski at pippiandcarlos.com
Thu Oct 15 15:58:45 UTC 2009


On Thu, 15 Oct 2009, Rich Shepard wrote:

> Date: Thu, 15 Oct 2009 08:37:50 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Rich Shepard <rshepard at appl-ecosys.com>
> To: plug at pdxlinux.org
> Subject: [PLUG] ps2ascii not working: GS-8.63
>
>   I've the GNU Ghostscript-8.63 installed, but when I try to convert a
> printed Web page (*.ps) to text (*.txt), I get what appears to be raw
> PostScript rather than ASCII text. I'm using Firefox-3.0.14.
>
>   Has anyone else encountered this? Is it related to a more current version
> of PS than that supported by ps2ascii? Are there alternative tools I could
> use?
>
> Rich

My ps2ascii man page mentions pstotext as an alternative. It claims
that pstotext is actually better because it takes the width of
characters into account:

ps2ascii ignoriert die Schriftkodierung und kommt nicht sonderlich gut
mit Unterscheidung (Kerning) zurecht. Somit sollten Sie für PostScript
(aber gegenwärtig nicht für PDF) pstotext benutzen (siehe unten).

Which means (roughly):

ps2ascii ignores the encoding and does not do especially well with
kerning. For that you should use pstotext for postscript (but
presently not for PDF).

Carlos


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