ghostscript 0.4.1
Interface to the Ghostscript C-API, both high- and low-level, based on ctypes
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.
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 ghostscript args = [ "ps2pdf", # actual value doesn't matter "-dNOPAUSE", "-dBATCH", "-dSAFER", "-sDEVICE=pdfwrite", "-sOutputFile=" + sys.argv[1], "-c", ".setpdfwrite", "-f", sys.argv[2] ] ghostscript.Ghostscript(*args)
Here an example for passing a string document to Ghostscript:
doc = """%! /Helvetica findfont 20 scalefont setfont 50 50 moveto (Hello World) show showpage """ import ghostscript args = """test.py -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=/tmp/out.pdf -c .setpdfwrite""".split() GS = ghostscript.Ghostscript(*args) try: GS.run_string(doc) finally: GS.exit()
More examples can be found in the examples subdirectory of the distribution archive.
Requirements and Installation
python-ghostscript requires
- Python 2.3 or higher (tested with Python 2.6)
- ctypes when using Python 2.3 or 2.4 (ctypes is already included in Python 2.5 and higher)
- setuptools or distribute for installation (see below).
- Ghostscript Version 8.x
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 easy_install or pip as usual. Please refer to the manuals of easy_install resp. pip for further information.
Alternatively you may download and unpack the source package of python-ghostscript from and run:
python ./setup.py install
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- Author: Hartmut Goebel
- Download URL:
- Keywords: Ghostscript,PDF,Postscript
- License: GPL 3.0
- Categories
- Development Status :: 4 - Beta
- Intended Audience :: Developers
- License :: OSI Approved :: GNU General Public License (GPL)
- Natural Language :: English
- Operating System :: OS Independent
- Programming Language :: Python
- Programming Language :: Python :: 2.5
- Programming Language :: Python :: 2.6
- Programming Language :: Python :: 2.7
- Topic :: Software Development :: Libraries :: Python Modules
- Package Index Owner: htgoebel
- DOAP record: ghostscript-0.4.1.xml