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5 <html xmlns="http://www.w3.org/1999/xhtml" xml:lang="en">
7 <title>PDF converter : sesse.net</title>
8 <meta name="description" content="Easily and freely create PDFs -- no strings attached" />
9 <link rel="stylesheet" href="http://www.sesse.net/sesse.css" type="text/css" />
10 <link rev="made" href="mailto:sgunderson@bigfoot.com" />
11 <meta name="MSSmartTagsPreventParsing" content="TRUE" />
14 <h1>PDF converter</h1>
19 <p id="lastupdated">August 8th, 2005</p>
23 <span class="copy">© 2005 <a href="http://www.sesse.net/">Steinar H. Gunderson</a>.</span></p>
27 <form method="post" action="createpdf.pl" enctype="multipart/form-data">
31 <td><input type="file" name="input" /></td>
34 <th><em>or</em> URL:</th>
35 <td><input type="text" name="url" size="40" /></td>
40 <select name="preset">
41 <option value="default">Default</option>
42 <option value="screen">Screen (72dpi, no embedded fonts)</option>
43 <option value="ebook">eBook (150dpi)</option>
44 <option value="printer">Printer (300dpi)</option>
45 <option value="prepress">Prepress (300dpi, better JPEG quality)</option>
51 <input type="submit" value="Make PDF" />
57 <p>This is an “anything to PDF” converter, not unlike what you get
58 from <a href="http://createpdf.adobe.com/">Adobe's PDF Online service</a>,
59 but completely free and running entirely on free software. It is also
60 completely without any kind of warranty or uptime guarantees -- I'll
61 try to do my best keeping it up, but in case people start dumping
62 multi-gigabyte jobs etc. on it regularily I might just not be able to
63 do that. Please be nice :-)</p>
65 <p>Note that there is minimal security involved; you can even look at
66 <a href="last.pl">the last 20 submitted jobs</a> at any time (this
67 is also handy for resuming a big download). <strong>Do not submit
68 any sensitive data!</strong></p>
70 <p>The converter is currently based on <a href="http://www.ghostscript.com/">GPL
71 GhostScript</a> 8.01 (yes, a bit old); everything is pushed through it in one form or the
72 other (if only for image recompression etc.). The PDF presets match
73 exactly those in GhostScript itself -- see the
74 <a href="http://www.cs.wisc.edu/~ghost/doc/cvs/Ps2pdf.htm#Options">table
75 of options</a> for more details. (Note that anything except “default”
76 will override whatever input parameters there are in the input PostScript
79 <p>The converter can currently handle the following formats, autodetected
80 by file extension <em>only</em>:</p>
83 <li>PostScript (.ps) and Encapsulated PostScript (.pdf), via GS directly</li>
84 <li>Plain text (.txt), via mpage</li>
85 <li>BMP (.bmp), PNG (.png), JPEG (.jpg/.jpeg), XPM (.xpm), via <a href="http://www.imagemagick.com">ImageMagick</a>.</li>
86 <li>Microsoft Word (.doc), Excel (.xls) and PowerPoint (.ppt), via
87 <a href="http://www.openoffice.org">OpenOffice.org</a> (could be
88 slightly sketchy at times, let me know if it's broken).</li>
89 <li>Lots of different programming-related formats (.c, .pl, .js, etc.),
90 via <a href="http://www.vim.org/">Vim</a>.</li>
91 <li>Web pages, via <a href="http://www.mozilla.org/newlayout/">Gecko</a>
92 and <a href="http://cvs.gnome.org/viewcvs/gnome-web-photo/">gnome-web-photo</a>
93 (thanks to Tommi Komulainen for telling me about the latter :-) ).</li>
98 <p>I've had a few requests for the source code, so I put it online in
99 an <a href="http://arch.sesse.net/index.cgi/sgunderson@bigfoot.com--2005/webpdf--mainline--1.0">Arch archive</a>.
100 If you're not familiar with Arch, don't despair, here's how with
101 either tla or bazaar:</p>
105 <pre>tla register-archive sgunderson@bigfoot.com--2005 http://arch.sesse.net/sgunderson@bigfoot.com--2005
106 tla get sgunderson@bigfoot.com--2005/webpdf--mainline--1.0 webpdf/</pre>
108 <h3>Using bazaar</h3>
110 <pre>baz get http://arch.sesse.net/sgunderson@bigfoot.com--2005/webpdf--mainline--1.0 webpdf/</pre>