PS2ASCII(1) Ghostscript Tools PS2ASCII(1)

NAME

ps2ascii - Ghostscript translator from PostScript or PDF to text

SYNOPSIS

ps2ascii [ input.ps [ output.txt ] ]
ps2ascii input.pdf [ output.txt ]

DESCRIPTION

ps2ascii uses gs(1) to extract text from PostScript(tm) or Adobe
Portable Document Format (PDF) files. If no files are specified on
the command line, gs reads from standard input. If no output file is
specified, the ASCII text is written to standard output.

The old ps2ascii.ps program was deprecated and removed some years
ago, the scripts now use the txtwrite device to extract text from the
input. This does a generally better job than the old PostScript
program and can extract Unicode not just ASCII. However it no longer
supports the COMPLEX feature.

SEE ALSO

Further documentation on the txtwrite device can be found at
https://ghostscript.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Devices.html#text-output

VERSION

This document was last revised for Ghostscript version 10.04.0.

AUTHOR

Artifex Software, Inc. are the primary maintainers of Ghostscript.
David M. Jones <dmjones@theory.lcs.mit.edu> made substantial
improvements to ps2ascii.

10.04.0 18 Sept 2024 PS2ASCII(1)