Question about retaining mixed plex when converting from PS to PDF

[Mark_41]

Good morning,

This is not specific to Acrobat. We use Acrobat, primarily, and there are a lot of PDF experts here so I figured that maybe someone would know of a place I could turn to. The forums specific to Ghostscript have been closed down and the other forums I've seen via Google search were circa 2007 or so. I've tried asking this in the Stack Overflow discussions but haven't had any luck so far.

We print Postscript files directly on industrial Xerox printers.

One client's Postscript files were getting garbled when printing due to a font issue that I was unable to track down, so I used Adobe's Distiller to convert from PS to PDF. The same font issues turned up in the PDFs that were generated from Distiller. No amount of option tweaking helped me out, and find/replace font operations using Callas pdfToolbox didn't work out for me.

So, I downloaded Ghostscript and spent an entertaining hour remembering how DOS worked. I was eventually able to convert several PS files into flawless-looking PDFs by going to the Ghostscript directory and doing this:

gswin64 -dQUIET -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=myoutputfilename.pdf myinputfilename.ps

But, I didn't think things all the way through because now I'm faced with the problem of mixed-plex. Some of the documents in the file are one-page documents and some are two-page documents, which should be printed duplex.

PS handles all of this for us when we put it on one of the Xerox printers. PDF, of course, does not. I can only specify simplex or duplex on the printer - so it's either one or the other, which doesn't work for a PDF with both.

Is there any clean, (or dirty), way to get around this? I was thinking of somehow instructing Ghostscript to insert blank pages after every simplex page of a PS file, and then just printing the entire PDF duplex, but have no idea how I would begin to do this.

Any assistance greatly appreciated.

[lrosenth · Accepted solution]

At this time, there is no method for changing such things in PDF – it was never designed for such things.

There is, however, a group at ISO working on a new standard that would provide for this (and many other similar things that one can do with PS for printer-specific control). It should be out in another year or two.