PS2ASCII(1) Ghostscript Tools PS2ASCII(1)
NAME
ps2ascii - Ghostscript translator from PostScript or PDF to text
SYNOPSIS
ps2ascii [ input.ps [ output.txt ] ]
ps2ascii input.pdf [ output.txt ]
DESCRIPTION
ps2ascii uses gs(1) to extract text from PostScript(tm) or Adobe
Portable Document Format (PDF) files. If no files are specified on the
command line, gs reads from standard input. If no output file is speci-
fied, the ASCII text is written to standard output.
The old ps2ascii.ps program was deprecated and removed some years ago,
the scripts now use the txtwrite device to extract text from the input.
This does a generally better job than the old PostScript program and can
extract Unicode not just ASCII. However it no longer supports the COM-
PLEX feature.
SEE ALSO
Further documentation on the txtwrite device can be found at
https://ghostscript.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Devices.html#text-output
VERSION
This document was last revised for Ghostscript version 10.04.0.
AUTHOR
Artifex Software, Inc. are the primary maintainers of Ghostscript.
David M. Jones <dmjones@theory.lcs.mit.edu> made substantial improve-
ments to ps2ascii.
10.04.0 18 Sept 2024 PS2ASCII(1)
Generated by dwww version 1.16 on Tue Dec 16 06:02:21 CET 2025.