PS2ASCII(1)                    Ghostscript Tools                   PS2ASCII(1)

NAME
       ps2ascii - Ghostscript translator from PostScript or PDF to text

SYNOPSIS
       ps2ascii [ input.ps [ output.txt ] ]
       ps2ascii input.pdf [ output.txt ]

DESCRIPTION
       ps2ascii uses gs(1) to extract text from PostScript(tm) or Adobe
       Portable Document Format (PDF) files. If no files are specified on the
       command line, gs reads from standard input.  If no output file is
       specified, the ASCII text is written to standard output.

       The old ps2ascii.ps program was deprecated and removed some years ago,
       the scripts now use the txtwrite device to extract text from the input.
       This does a generally better job than the old PostScript program and
       can extract Unicode not just ASCII. However it no longer supports the
       COMPLEX feature.


SEE ALSO
       Further documentation on the txtwrite device can be found at
       https://ghostscript.readthedocs.io/en/latest/Devices.html#text-output


VERSION
       This document was last revised for Ghostscript version 10.04.0.

AUTHOR
       Artifex Software, Inc. are the primary maintainers of Ghostscript.
       David M. Jones <dmjones@theory.lcs.mit.edu> made substantial
       improvements to ps2ascii.

10.04.0                          18 Sept 2024                      PS2ASCII(1)