PDFprint

Version 2.0 29th March 1998

Programming by Fabrizio Pivari <pivari@geocities.com>
Documentation by Fabrizio Pivari <pivari@geocities.com>
What is PDFprint
PDFprint is a very flexible tool to print PDF files from different directories and recursively from every subdirectories (in the future, form FTP and HTTP sites) to a printer or to the monitor, in PostScript format or in text format. 		ANFACE Software
ANFACE Software logo
Viewer method
At the moment, if you want to print a PDF file you need a tool that converts it in PostScript format (level 3 PostScript printers will accept PDF format directly). Usually, the tool is a reader, so you have to visualize the PDF file, then the tool converts it in a PostScript file and sends the PostScript file to the printer.
How can you print the first page of all your PDF files in your archive?
How can you read the first page of all your PDF files in your archive?
With PDFprint you can solve these problems.
Getting and Installing PDFprint

  1. Get the latest Version of PDFprint from:
    http://www.geocities.com/CapeCanaveral/Lab/3469/pdfprint.html or CPAN

  2. Get and compile the xpdf, inside you can find pdftops and pdftotext tools:
    http://www.aimnet.com/~derekn/xpdf/
    If you have just compiled Ghostscript 5.xx, you can use pdf2ps script

  3. Make sure you have Perl Version 5.003 or later on your system:
    http://www.perl.com/perl/info/software.html

  4. Create your personal pdfprint.cfg file.
    You can change the value of converter and print variables.
    With converter you can use pdf2ps, pdftops to convert PDF files, to PostScript files, pdftotext to convert PDF files to texts.
    In pdftops and pdftotext you can specify the pages to convert with the options

    In pdftops you can specify to convert to Level 1 PostScript (default is Level 2 PostScript) with -level1 option.
    In pdftotext you can specify to convert to 7-bit ASCII (default is 8-bit ISO Latin-1) with -ascii7 option.
    With printer you can use printing commands like lpr and lp or monitor commands like more and pg. Every PDF file, you have selected, is conveted with the selected converter tool, then printed with the selected printer tool.

  5. Try to start PDFprint. Type ./pdfprint ./tests/pdfprint.pdf on the command line
Syntax

pdfprint [-options] files 
where options include:
    -help                        print out this message
    -verbose                     verbose
    -recursive directory         scan recursively the directory
    -configure file              default pdfprint.cfg

files:
    with files you can use metacharacters and relative and absolute path name
    only files with .pdf and .PDF extensions are accepted
    
example:
    pdfprint *.pdf
    pdfprint -v -c tests/test.cfg */*.pdf
    pdfprint -r pdfdocs
What's new in this version
Here you can find an exhaustive history file