Author

Hartmut Goebel <h.goebel@crazy-compiler.com>

Version

0.5dev

Copyright

GNU Public License v3 (GPLv3)

Homepage

http://bitbucket.org/htgoebel/python-ghostscript

Ghostscript, is a well known interpreter for the PostScript language and for PDF. This package implements a interface to the Ghostscript C-API using ctypes. Both a low-level and a pythonic, high-level interface are provided.

This package is currently tested only under GNU/Linux. Please report whether it works in your environment, too. Thanks.

Here is an example for how to use the high-level interface of python-ghostscript. This implements a very basic ps2pdf-tool:

import sys
import ghostscript

args = [
    "ps2pdf", # actual value doesn't matter
    "-dNOPAUSE", "-dBATCH", "-dSAFER",
    "-sDEVICE=pdfwrite",
    "-sOutputFile=" + sys.argv[1],
    "-c", ".setpdfwrite",
    "-f",  sys.argv[2]
    ]

ghostscript.Ghostscript(*args)

Here an example for passing a string document to Ghostscript:

doc = """%!
/Helvetica findfont 20 scalefont setfont       
50 50 moveto
(Hello World) show
showpage
"""

import ghostscript

args = """test.py
     -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=/tmp/out.pdf
     -c .setpdfwrite""".split()

GS = ghostscript.Ghostscript(*args)
try:
    GS.run_string(doc)
finally:
    GS.exit()

More examples can be found in the examples subdirectory of the distribution archive.

Please note

This package is meant for developers. Even if there are some usable examples included, installations instructions are meant for developers.

python-ghostscript requires

• Python 2.3 or higher (tested with Python 2.6)
• ctypes when using Python 2.3 or 2.4 (ctypes is already included in Python 2.5 and higher)
• setuptools or distribute for installation (see below).
• Ghostscript Version 8.x

Since this package is meant for developers, we assume you have experience in installing Python packages.

python-ghostscript is listed on PyPI (Python Package Index), so you can install it using easy_install or pip as usual. Please refer to the manuals of easy_install resp. pip for further information.

Alternatively you my download and unpack the source package of python-ghostscript from http://pypi.python.org/pypi/ghostscript and run:

python ./setup.py install