43.24 Other PostScript Utilities

PSUtils	Angus Duggan's PSUtils package contains several interesting tools in addition to psselect ( 43.23 ) . They're a bit more esoteric, but they can be very useful in some situations: for example, if you're printing a brochure or a bulletin, these tools help to automate the task. We'll only summarize them quickly; you can look at Angus's manual pages for detailed information.

epsffit

Fits an EPSF file -capsulated PostScript) to a given bounding box. epsffit can center the image, rotate it, adjust the aspect ratio, and add showpage to make it print.

extractres

Extracts resources (fonts, procsets, patterns, files, etc.) from a PostScript document into separate files, replacing them with appropriate %%IncludeResource comments in the document prologue. This makes it safe to rearrange the document with psnup or pstops .

includeres

Includes resources (fonts, procsets, patterns, files, etc.) indicated by the %%IncludeResource comments in a PostScript document. (See extractres above.)

psbook

Rearranges files in a PostScript document into "signatures"; that is, rearranges pages so that folding them "naturally" will result in a book or pamphlet.

psmerge

Merges PostScript documents into a single document. It only works in specific cases: documents created by the same application, with the same device setup and resources loaded.

psnup

Rearranges a PostScript document so that it prints several pages on each sheet of paper, scaling and orienting the pages appropriately for a booklet. Together with psbook , psnup makes production of a booklet (or even a moderate-sized book) relatively easy.

As with psbook , you may need a preprocessor like fixfmps ( 43.23 ) to put the PostScript file into an acceptable form.

psresize

Rescales and centers a document on a different size of paper. For example, it converts an American letter-size document to A4 size paper.

pstops

A general utility for rearranging pages in a PostScript document. You can select individual pages, put several pages on an individual page with different orientations, and so on.