I see the non-standard behaviour of the ghostscript tools as quite
troublesome, because they are likely to be used in conjunction with
tools such as those provided by psutils, which behave as standard Unix
text processing utilities. This can lead to awkward pipelines such as
the following, which is given in two equivalent forms, and which
rearranges the pages of a document to produce a booklet for double-sided
printing:
pdf2ps example.pdf - | psbook | psnup -n 2 | ps2pdf - example-booklet.pdf
pdf2ps - - < example.pdf | psbook | psnup -n 2 | ps2pdf - - >
example-booklet.pdf
The first form is shorter, but the second requires less rewriting when
one adds or removes sections at the ends of the pipeline.
Altering the way that the ghostscript tools deal with command-line
arguments may be desirable, but it is not a trivial change, because it
may break existing scripts, and only trivial changes should be Wishlist
items in Launchpad (see https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Importance).
Making the tools just slightly more verbose might be considered trivial,
but it would still be better done upstream. The tools could specify the
output file, in a similar manner to wget, when they have created the
filename implicitly. For example:
Output: Report_a_bug_about_Ubuntu.ps
As it happens, the tools such as pdf2ps are shell-script wrappers around
an executable, and so are easily tweaked. An example patch for pdf2ps
is attached.
** Attachment added: "Patch for pdf2ps to echo output filename when not user
specified"
http://launchpadlibrarian.net/15572891/pdf2ps-echo-output-filename-when-not-user-specified.patch
--
pdf2ps creates empty output
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/241544
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