Print > Save as Postscript...

IHE,

I tried to duplicate your problem. I took a document that had been created for in US Letter size and changed the paper size in the Document Inspector. The document reformatted, producing more, smaller, pages as would be expected. Printed to PS. Opened the PS doc in Preview and it looked just as it had after reformatting in Pages. Printing from Preview, I had a choice of paper sizes. I'm not sure where the problem is.

Jerry

IHE wrote:
Hi Jerry,

Thanks for the response. Odd. My 6 x 9 formatted Pages document, when printed to PS, comes out on screen as though it's a 6 x 9 document printed on 8.5 x 11 paper.

Ian,

That all sounds logical, although I am not sure how you are viewing the PS doc. If in Preview, I suggest that you select the Preview display within the Print menu window and click on different paper size choices and see how the preview changes with paper size.

The Pages document that I tested with had the default margins.

Jerry

The page size of my document is 6 x 9. When I "Print > Save as Postscript..." the resulting PS document comes out as US Letter Size. I can't find a way to specify the output size for PS printing/saving. Any suggestions?

Interesting, not perhaps for you, but from the point of view of technical writing. Why? Because of the difference in the printing philosophy for Mac OS (PS and raster) versus Mac OS X (PDF and raster).

In principle, in a PostScript process you have to have the device parameters as defined in the PDD PostScript Printer Definition at the point when the PostScript program is written.

The device parameters define such things as the format facilities of the device, the paper feed facilities of the device, and the colourant models of the device.

In a PDF process you do not have to have the device parameters at the point when the PDF is written, in fact you try to avoid this by writing the page description at a higher level of abstraction.

Things permitted in PostScript and EPS are prohibited in PDF, including such things as programmed screenings (possible in Photoshop) and transfer curves (possible in Photoshop).

Moreover, in so far as possible you should never (meaning never, never) write out PostScript to disk in order to convert that into PDF. Adobe Acrobat Distiller has been a dead product for a decade because PostScript does not support the intelligent profile model of the International Colour Consortium, the intelligent font model of the Unicode Consortium, or indeed transparency.

/hh

Hi Ian,

I just ran into a similar problem. In my case, I was trying to print from Pages to create a PDF for making a book on Lulu. When I would create a PDF directly from Pages, everything was fine - each page would come out as 9x7. Unfortunately Lulu can't handle Apple produced PDFs. So, I would try to print a postscript file. This would seem to work, but the pages would actually be A4.

It seems that a solution should be to set the page size in the print sheet. Namely, do "Print...", select "Paper Handling", select "Scale to fit paper size" and then choose "9x7" (or whatever custom size you have). For some odd reason, this did not work for me.

The solution that does work involves downloading an application called Ghostscript. You should be able to find a DMG for easy installation. Once installed, you'll need to run the ghostscript application from a terminal (see Applications/Utilities/Terminal). Run the following command:

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=<output pdf file> -dNOPAUSE <input pdf file>

Note that both the input file and output file are PDF files. Instead of having to type out the full paths of the files, just drag the file from the Finder to the terminal window. If you're able to get Pages to output a postscript file, then the input file can be postscript. The result of all this is a PDF that is sized correctly. This was the only way I could figure out to get a 9x7 PDF that was acceptable by Lulu.

Hope this helps.

Cheers,
Doug