Ubuntu Musings

A bunch of years ago, I got hooked on ps2pdf. I used (and still use) it extensively. I wrote about it. I tried to convince others to use it, with varying degrees of success.

The only thing that bothered me about ps2pdf is that I had to remember a lot of command line options to use it the way I wanted to. Then, I got to thinking, why not write a GUI front-end for it? I hatched a plot to do so, using Tcl/Tk. It never happened.

You’re probably wondering 1) why Tcl/Tk, and 2) why I didn’t follow through. Well, Tcl/Tk was used extensively by the company that employed me at that time. I thought I’d make myself more useful and learn the language, and the ps2pdf front-end would have been a good project. As for not following through, well … a lot of things got in that way.

A couple of weeks ago, I was musing about reviving that project. Turns out that I don’t have to. Someone already has put together a nice GUI front-end to ps2pdf called Moonshiner. I like it. A lot.

Installation

Moonshiner is written in Python, using PyGTK. If you don’t have either installed on your computer, you can do the deed using Synaptic (or your package manager of choice). Then, download the archive and extract it. From there, run the command make install as root to install it.

Using it

Using Moonshiner is easy. Just run the command moonshiner. The interface is pretty simple. You can use it right out of the box with the default ps2pdf settings. All you have to do is drag and drop a Postscript file from your file manager on to the Moonshiner window and then click the Go Moonshining button. The resulting PDF is saved to the same directory as the Postscript file.

Configuring the app

You can make Moonshiner do a lot more by tweaking the configuration. You can change the output target, the PDF version, how Moonshiner handles images, colour conversion settings, whether or not to embed fonts, and whether or not to encrypt the PDF. To do that, you’ll need to know a little bit about ps2pdf’s settings; you can learn more here.

Overall, Moonshiner is a nice tool. And it’s coded better than I could ever have done …

Related posts:

1. Using ps2pdf
2. Combining PDFs with Ghostscript
3. Viewing a Word file at the command line

This entry was posted on Monday, December 15th, 2008 at 5:00 am and is filed under Linux, Software. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.