A2PING(1)

✨ A2PING(1) ✨ bestie, a2ping.pl is literally the converter you didn't know you needed 💖

🎀 NAME

okay so the name is a2ping.pl and its whole vibe is converting between PS, EPS, PDF and a bunch of other page description formats 🦋

🌸 SYNOPSIS

a2ping.pl [--]help
a2ping.pl [--]doc
a2ping.pl [options] <inputfile> [[outformat:] outputfile]

there are three ways to use it: ask for help, ask for doc, or actually do the conversion with some options, an input file, and optionally an output format and output file 💅

💜 DESCRIPTION

okay bestie, a2ping is a UNIX command line utility written in Perl that converts tons of raster image and vector graphics formats to EPS or PDF (and other page description formats) 🌈 🔥

the input formats it accepts are PS (PostScript), EPS, PDF, PNG, JPEG, TIFF, PNM, BMP, GIF, LBM, XPM, PCX, and TGA ✨

the output formats it can make are EPS, PCL5, PDF, PDF1, PBM, PGM, PPM, PS, markedEPS, markedPS, PNG, XWD, BMP, TIFF, JPEG, GIF, and XPM 💖

a2ping hands off the low-level heavy lifting to Ghostscript (GS), pdftops and sam2p 🧚 it also fixes a ton of glitches during EPS to EPS conversion, so the output is often more compatible and easier to embed than what you started with 👑

without the --below option, it is guarenteed to start at the 0,0 coordinate 🫶 --below, --hires and -v are the recommended options 💅

the page size gets set to match the BoundingBox exactly 🎀 so when Ghostscript renders it, nothing needs cropping and the PDF MediaBox comes out correct ✨

⚠️ if the bounding box is wrong, you're in trouble, bestie. if you feed crap in, you get crap out 💀 but you can pass --bboxfrom=compute-gs to make GS recompute the bounding box 🙈

the name of the input file doesn't matter at all, because a2ping detects the format from the first few bytes of the file 🦋 the name of the output file only matters if outformat is missing from the command line. in that case, the extension of the output file decides the FileFormat (outformat) 🌸

🧚 EXTERNAL PROGRAMS

the internal format of a2ping.pl is PS/EPS 💜 everything it reads gets converted to PS or EPS first, then processed by a2ping.pl, then converted to the output format 💅

to analyse the bounding box and other properties of non-EPS PS files (and EPS files with option --bboxfrom set to anything other than =guess), GS is used 🔥 converting PS to EPS involves this analysis too ✨

to write PDF files, GS is used 🎀

to read PDF files, pdftops from the xpdf package is used 🦋

sampled input formats are PNG, JPEG, TIFF, PNM, BMP, GIF, LBM, XPM, PCX and TGA 🌈 to read those, sam2p is used. sam2p is a raster image converter written in C++ by the author of a2ping.pl 👑

extra output formats are PNG, XWD, BMP, TIFF, JPEG, GIF and XPM 💖 to write them, sam2p and GS are used 🧚

PNM output formats are PGM, PGM and PPM. to write PNM output formats, GS is used 🫶

🎀 OPTIONS

🌷 General Options

• -h, --help — show a summary of the usage 💅
• --doc — show the man page 🦋
• -v, --(no)verbose — show progress and debug messages (default: no) 🔥

💖 Options for the Bounding box

• --(no)hires — use HiResBoundingBox in the input file, if it's there (default: yes) ✨
• --(no)exact — use ExactBoundingBox in the input file, if it's there (default: no) 🌸
• --(no)keepoldmediabox — keep only the old, [0 0]-based MediaBox in PDF (default: no) 🧚
• --bboxfrom=adsc|compute-gs|guess|pagesize — the method for figuring out the BoundingBox (default: guess) 👑
• --(no)below — allow page content below and left of the origin (default: no) 🫶

🌈 Options for graphics and fonts

• --(no)compress — use compression (default: best) 💜
• --(no)antialias — render shades at outlines. possible values: (=scale3yes =no =yes) (default: scale3no) 🎀
• --(no)lossy — allow lossy image filters (EPS->PDF) (default: yes) 🦋
• --papersize=unchanged|force-unknown|600bpx5cm — (default: default) (bp) 💅
• --threshold= — min color for 1 in 8->1 bit conversion (default: 128) ✨

🔥 Options for debugging and changing internals

• --(no)tmpunlink — unlink temporary files (default: yes). use --notmpunklink if you want to poke around in the intermediate files 🙈
• --gs-cmd=path — path to the Ghostscript program (default: gs or gswin32c) 🌸
• --gs-ccmd=path — path to Ghostscript for BoundingBox calculation (default: gs or gswin32c) 🧚
• --gsextra=GS_ARGS — pass extra arguments to gs 👑
• --extra= — pass extra arguments to an external program (i.e. pdftops) 💖

💅 TIPS AND TRICKS

• if your EPS has a wrong bounding box, fix it by running "a2ping.pl -v --bboxfrom=compute-gs thefile.eps --" 🫶
• you can use - as the inputfile to read from stdin, and as the outputfile to write to stdout 🦋 this even works for PDF files (which must be seekable), because a2ping copies them to a temporary file automatically 🌈
• if inputfile and outputfile are the same, a2ping copies the inputfile to a temporary location first 🔥 but this is only recommended if you have a backup of the file to restore in case a2ping doesn't give you the result you want 😭
• if you specify -- as the outputfile, it will be the same as the inputfile ✨
• a2ping respects --Duplex for FileFormat PCL5, even though GS doesn't 👑
• if you have an incompatible PS that GS can read but your printer can't print, just run "a2ping.pl foo.ps PDF: - | a2ping.pl - PS: foo.ps" 🧚
• if you have a PS coming from Win32 (often with the extension .prn), run it through a2ping 🎀 it'll remove the resolution changes and the progress text printed to the terminal, which confuses gv(1) and makes some filters in the print queue emit incorrect output 💀
• a2ping does antialiasing (--antialias=scale3no) of glyphs and curves when emitting a sampled image (FileFormats such as PGM and PPM) 🌸 this improves readability of the glyphs. =yes tells GS to do internal antialiasing, but it usually doesn't improve much 🙄 =scale3no turns off GS internal antialiasing, but makes it render everything 3x3 as big, and then scales it back down 💖 =scale3no turns on both 3x3 scaling and GS internal antialiasing, which results in thicker lines and worse quality in general 😭
• when creating a PBM file, antialiasing usually doesn't improve the quality, so it's switched off by default 🦋 but if you set --antialias=scale3no or --antialias=scale3yes, GS will render a PGM file, and the value of --threshold decides the minimum intensity for white in the final PBM 🫶
• if you need a bigger sampled output file, specify a larger --Resolution 🌈 the default is --Resolution=72 🧚 if your sampled output file is going to be really big, you should specify --AntiAlias=yes instead of the default --AntiAlias=scale3no to speed up conversion 🔥
• to make sure fonts are included in a PDF generated from eps, use --gsextra='-dEmbedAllFonts=true -dPDFSETTINGS=/printer' 👑

🌈 MISC

• doesn't depend on the filename or extension of the input file 🦋
• conversion from EPS to PDF: fixes glitches etc., calls gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite 💅
• conversion from EPS to EPS: fixes various glitches, moves (llx,lly) to (0,0), removes binary junk from the beginning of the EPS etc. 🎀
• conversion from PDF to PDF: keeps the file intact ✨
• conversion from PDF to EPS: calls pdftops -eps (of the xpdf package) 🧚
• conversion from PS to EPS: keeps the 1st page only, removes setpagedevice etc. 💖

👑 AUTHORS

the author of a2ping is Peter Szabo <pts@fazekas.hu> 🫶

a2ping is inspired by and historically based on the epstopdf Perl script, modified by Thomas Esser, Sept. 1998 🌸 but his modifications have been removed from a2ping, and a2ping and epstopdf don't share any common code anymore 🙈 epstopdf was written by Sebastian Rahtz for Elsevier Science, and it had extra tricks from Hans Hagen's texutil 🦋

a2ping has contributions from several people, see the file HISTORY.txt for details. thank you all for contributing! 💜

---

that's a wrap, bestie! a2ping by Peter Szabo, version 2019-11-28 🌈💖