If all goes well, you’ll have yourself a PDF file that you can view in Acrobat Reader, xpdf, or any other PDF viewer. If you leave it out ps2pdf gives the PDF file the name of the PostScript file and a. You don’t need to include the name of the PDF file on the command line. Then, type ps2pdf followed by the name of your PostScript file.

If you are in a graphical environment like KDE or GNOME, open a terminal window and change to the directory containing the PostScript file that you want to convert. Let’s assume that you’ve created a PostScript file and now want to convert it to PDF. If not, you can download and install GhostScript to get it. If a path is displayed (for example, /usr/bin/ps2pdf), then you’re ready to go. To find out if ps2pdf is installed on your system, type which ps2pdf at the command line. GhostScript is a standard part of most Linux systems. ps2pdf runs a PostScript file through GhostScript and outputs a PDF file. Ps2pdf is a script that comes bundled with GhostScript, a freeware PostScript interpreter. There are a number of ways to create a PDF in Linux, but one of the most popular methods is to use a utility called ps2pdf.Ī number of Linux applications, most notably and TeX, can create PDFs without the need to create a PostScript file, so why use ps2pdf? Because there are times you need to create PDF files that these applications don’t support.Īccording to the ps2pdf documentation, ps2pdf can “process complex and difficult PostScript files that Acrobat Distiller is not able to handle.” I’ve never run into this situation myself, but I know of a few people who turned in desperation to ps2pdf because they could not get usable output from Acrobat Distiller. Linux, however, has no version of Distiller. On Windows and Mac OS, most people create PDF files by first creating a PostScript file and then using Adobe Acrobat Distiller to generate a PDF.

For better or for worse, Adobe’s Portable Document Format (PDF) is a wildly popular way of exchanging information.

Acrobat linux