Department of Physics and Astronomy - Computer Facilities
Unix Environment for Physics - Programs

Hints for reformatting PostScript Files

Postscript files are supposed to be complete descriptions of sets of printable pages. Who/what/ever made the file made an assumption about the size of the page, and if that does not match the size of the paper in the printer, results will not be good. All our printers are currently set up with paper 8 1/2 inches wide and 11 inches high.

There is a program called pstops which is very powerful at reconfiguring the layout of these pages. For example, if you have prepared a latex document in article style without size modifications, and you wish to print two pages per side with as little reduction as possible, try
pstops "2:0L@.9(9.0in,-1.0in)+1L@.9(9.0in,4.3in)" infile.ps > out.ps
will make a new postscript file, out.ps, which can be viewed with ghostview or printed with lpr.

For printing an A4 document on letter-sized paper, try
pstops "2@.93(40,60)" infile.ps > out.ps

There is a program called psnup which is supposed to be a user-friendlier interface for pstops.

These two programs are installed, but unfortunately their man pages are currently hidden in /import/positron/h6/usr2/local/man/man1. Clearly this needs to be changed.

Please send any comments about this page to RIchard Vaughn.

Last modified: Wed Mar 29 10:56:09 EDT 2006