[Gs-devel] PDF per page / page source selection

[Ray Johnston]

Dax,

Dax Kelson wrote:
> > Dax Kelson wrote:
> > > ...
> > > Is it possible to embed within the PS or PDF, on a per page basis,
> > > which *input* bin that the paper should be drawn from?
>
> Thanks very much.  I have ~300 page document that needs to be printed on
> four different types of paper depending on the page, and I'm trying to
> figure out the best and least error prone way to do this.  We will need
> many copies of the document.  The document will have some minor changes
> over time.
> 
> We would like to print it on a Xerox DocuTech at Kinkos.

I'm glad you got to mentioning WHY you needed this. Lots of the
things Michael Sweet mentions are very device dependent as is the
input tray selection.

The least error prone method for a single document that you want
to print is also the most labor intensive, but from what you say
may be the best.

In my experience, Kinko's is happiest with PDF documents since they
find these MUCH more portable.

The least error prone way to proceed is to create separate files for
each media type. Each file would contain a group of pages that all
have the same media type. If you have an overall PostScript file,
first convert it to PDF. If you already have the entire document in
PDF, great. Ghostscript can read the PDF and write a new PDF with
a subset range of pages using the -dFirstPage=nnn -dLastPage=mmm
command line options with the -sDEVICE=pdfwrite option to select
the pdf writer. The -sOutputFile=xxxxx.pdf can be used to set the
output file name.

This way each range of pages can be in a separate file. Just tell
Kinko's all of the PDF files to be printed on a certain media type.
You could use Ghostscript to read all of the PDF files for each
media type and create a composite PDF file, but this isn't really
needed. AFAIK, Kinko's doesn't have any per file setup charge.

This is hardly an elegant solution, but one that works 'off the
shelf' even though it requires some manual labor the good news is
that it doesn't rely on Kinko's being able to interpret a Job 
Ticket or anything sophisticated.

Regards,
Ray Johnston
Artifex Software Inc.
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