========================== python-ghostscript

Python-Interface to the Ghostscript C-API

:Author: Hartmut Goebel h.goebel@crazy-compiler.com :Version: 0.7 :License: GNU General Public License v3 or later (GPLv3+) :Homepage: https://gitlab.com/pdftools/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.

__ http://www.ghostscript.com/ __ http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/cvs/API.htm __ http://docs.python.org/library/ctypes.html

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

Example

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 locale
  import ghostscript

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

  # arguments have to be bytes, encode them
  encoding = locale.getpreferredencoding()
  args = [a.encode(encoding) for a in args]

  ghostscript.Ghostscript(*args)

Here an example for passing a string document to Ghostscript::

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

  import ghostscript

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

  with ghostscript.Ghostscript(*args) as gs:
      gs.run_string(doc)


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


Requirements and Installation

: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__ 3.6 or higher (tested with Python 3.6–3.9)
• setuptools__ for installation (see below)
• Ghostscript__ Version 9.0.8 or higher

__ http://www.python.org/download/ __ http://pypi.python.org/pypi/setuptools __ http://www.ghostscript.com/

Installing python-ghostscript

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 pip install ghostscript as usual. Please refer to the manuals of pip for further information.

__ http://pypi.python.org/pypi

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

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