August 5th, 2005
This is an “anything to PDF” converter, not unlike what you get from Adobe's PDF Online service, but completely free and running entirely on free software. It is also completely without any kind of warranty or uptime guarantees -- I'll try to do my best keeping it up, but in case people start dumping multi-gigabyte jobs etc. on it regularily I might just not be able to do that. Please be nice :-)
Note that there is minimal security involved; if I feel like it, I might even take a look at what people are processing. Do not submit any sensitive data!
The converter is currently based on GPL GhostScript 8.01 (yes, a bit old); everything is pushed through it in one form or the other (if only for image recompression etc.). The PDF presets match exactly those in GhostScript itself -- see the table of options for more details. (Note that anything except “default” will override whatever input parameters there are in the input PostScript file.)
The converter can currently handle the following formats, autodetected by file extension only:
If somebody knows a good way of getting a Gecko-based browser to convert from an URL or HTML file to PostScript (on the command line), please let me know; I'd guess HTML would be the most-wanted format missing. :-)
I've had a few requests for the source code, so I put it online in an Arch archive. If you're not familiar with Arch, don't despair, here's how with either tla or bazaar:
tla register-archive sgunderson@bigfoot.com--2005 http://arch.sesse.net/sgunderson@bigfoot.com--2005 tla get sgunderson@bigfoot.com--2005/webpdf--mainline--1.0 webpdf/
baz get http://arch.sesse.net/sgunderson@bigfoot.com--2005/webpdf--mainline--1.0 webpdf/