Create print-ready PDF/X (with bleedbox, trimbox, mediabox, etc) programatically?

Question

Hi,

I was wondering if it is possible to programaticaly create a PDF file with an acceptable quality for the production press, ideally using only open-source libraries.

Right now the process is like this: -create texts and images -merge them into a postscript file -use Acrobat Distiller to convert it to PDF (Acrobat distiller helps you check all the parameters of the PDF) -send the PDF to the press

What I want is something like: -take all texts and pictures in this folder -encode them into the press-ready PDF, something similar to what Distiller produces -send them to the press

How would you do that? Many thanks...

Answer 1

You can generate pdfs using f.e. TeXML and XeLaTeX (first one to make scripting easier -- TeX has lots of quirks in syntax).

I also tried OpenJade and its DocBook support, but the quality was lower. TeX seems to do typesetting much better.

Both ways are using standalone programs... which you can use in shell scripts or call using system facilities.

Answer 2

You didn't mention which version of Distiller you're using. Recent versions do have a setting that lets you generate (different verions of) PDF/X. See also the *.joboptions files which ship with Distiller.

Answer 3

Are the Ghostscript's gsdll32.dll and gswin{32,64}.c.exe with their source code and the GPL3 enough (or too much) of Open Source? They ship as part of all recent releases (newest one currently: v8.71).

Ghostscript can create very good quality PDF. See here for the most recent documentation about its PDF/A and PDF/X support.

Note, that this documentation until very recently was a bit misleading: it missed hinting at the requirement to edit+adapt the referred PDFA_def.ps or PDFX_def.ps templates. If you followed the old documentation without editing the templates to specifically point to the ICC color profile you wanted to embed, your output would be valid PDF, but would not pass all checks testing for compliancy with the official PDF/A+PDF/X standards.