macOS Convert hundreds of PostScript files to pdf

You might want to look at ImageMagick

With that, you could write a shell script to convert each file.

mt

Have you tried Automator?

Automater would be the first thing I would try as well.

Ive used CS3 batch for BMP to Tiff - I don't know but I'd take a guess that it will do postscript to PDF also ? (maybe someone knows)

In /Library/Scripts/Printing Scripts/ you'll find the Convert to PDF applescript, you should be able to modify that to do what you want. It ultimately uses cupsfilter, so if you want to write a shell script rather than Applescript you could look at the man documentation for that.

Is there something wrong with using the Terminal and systems supplied 'pstopdf' tool?

Drop em all on acrobat distiller.

ign said:

Is there a command in terminal that does it for a batch of files ??

Click to expand...

lloyddean said:

Is there something wrong with using the Terminal and systems supplied 'pstopdf' tool?

Click to expand...

+1

B

I thought PostScript was a printer language, not a file type like PDF. Oh well, you learn something everyday.

No answer from anyone knowledgeable in shell scripting, that includes me, but I'll try anyway.

Save the following to a file called 'ps2pdf' somewhere in your path followed by a 'sudo chmod 777 ps2pdf' on the file to give it permission for anyone to read, write and execute it.

Invoke it with the list of files you wish to convert. PDF files will be created with the same name as the source files minus the .ps but appended with .pdf.
Example

ps2pdf *.ps

chown33 said:

That line should be:

Code:

for f in "$@"

You don't have to make it a separate shell script, though. The OP could just copy and paste these lines into a Terminal window (assuming his shell is bash).

Code:

for f in *.ps
do
	pstopdf "$f"
done

This assumes the ps files all end in ".ps", and they are all in the current directory. To improve the script, though, we'd need the OP to tell us more about where the ps files are located, e.g. whether they're in nested sub-dirs, on a remote server, etc.

Click to expand...

Thanks for that. Its been a verrry long time since I've messed around with shell scripting.

Assumptions were all there was to go on - but I believe it may be best to provide a scripted method that hangs around versus one that has to be remembered and retyped if this becomes a frequent event.

chown33 said:

This assumes the ps files all end in ".ps", and they are all in the current directory. To improve the script, though, we'd need the OP to tell us more about where the ps files are located, e.g. whether they're in nested sub-dirs, on a remote server, etc.

Click to expand...

You could also just get rid of the for loop and replace with find and xargs if things are more complicated. (e.g. you need to recurse a directory tree)

Read here for some examples http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Xargs or just "man xargs"

B

that will find them in subdirectories too.

Try my app which was made in automator.

http://www.goodrunb.com/irenamer/