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rivierrakid

Member

From: Newcastle, UK

Registered: 2006-06-28

Posts: 21

Multiple postscript files and paper saving

a little background..

Im using kicad to create circuit boards (PCB), kicad exports to postscript files.

All my postcript files are A4 but the actual circuit boards are only a couple of inches.

I'd like to be able to have a few circuits on one A4 sheet to try and save on transparency paper (not cheap), but struggling to find a solution.

I tried Imagemagik's 'convert', with the idea to produce images and crop and place them, but the quality of the conversion is poor and pixelated, and the same results when importing them into gimp.

Also, the scale must be kept the same.

any ideas?

cheers

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gnud

Member

Registered: 2005-11-27

Posts: 182

Re: Multiple postscript files and paper saving

You can control the quality of the ps -> raster conversion with the -density switch.

E.g

~ $ convert -density 120 somefile.ps somefile.png

The (very low) default is 72.

So my suggestion is:
-First, convert all the ps to png.
-Then, crop away all the white, unneeded space
-Join these together into a ps or pdf.

I am really not the one you should be consulting (I have to look up manpages for everything, same as you), but if you post any problem here I will see if I can help you.

skottish

Forum Fellow

From: Here

Registered: 2006-06-16

Posts: 7,942

Re: Multiple postscript files and paper saving

You can use ps2pdf14 to covert postscript to PDF, and open that in GIMP. The quality is very good. I don't know which package it comes from though.

EDIT

It comes with Ghostscript, so you should already have it.

Last edited by skottish (2007-12-04 04:23:59)

Snowman

Developer/Forum Fellow

From: Montreal, Canada

Registered: 2004-08-20

Posts: 5,212

Re: Multiple postscript files and paper saving

you can also try psnup from the psutils package.

rivierrakid

Member

From: Newcastle, UK

Registered: 2006-06-28

Posts: 21

Re: Multiple postscript files and paper saving

Thanks for the replys.

I dont have time to fiddle just yet, but Ive quickly tried the 'convert -density 120' and improves the image quality drastically, although the scale seams have almost doubled.

Ill try the other suggestions & tweak about and post my results hopefully tonight.

thanks chaps

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Arrrrrrrr me harties