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 specified, 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 COMPLEX 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 improvements to ps2ascii.