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macOS Convert hundreds of PostScript files to pdf

I

ign

macrumors member
Original poster
Mar 16, 2004
37
1
Firenze
Hello,

I need to convert a bunch of PostScript files to pdf.
With OSX one can open the postscript file and save it in pdf,
but I can't do it one by one, it'd take for ever.
Is there a command in terminal that does it for a batch of files ??

thank you!
 
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.
 
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

Code: 
#!/bin/bash
#
# sudo chmod 777 ps2pdf

for f in *.ps
do
	pstopdf "$f"
done
 
lloyddean said:
Code: 
for f in *.ps
Click to expand...

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.
 
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
 
thanks a lot for all the suggestions. I had tried with automator and it actually worked even though the resulting pdf had 5x the size of the pdf created doing it one by one in finder.

Anyway I'll go for the terminal command which seems the most robust and fast solution. I'll play with it and see if I make it, I'll let you know !

cheers
 
Code: 
find . -name \*.ps -exec pstopdf {} \;

that will find them in subdirectories too.
 
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