ps2pdf

ps2pdf

I got a bit confused about the ps2pdf conversion utility. Some people claim, that it invariably creates pdf files with letter pagesize. However there is the argument -sPAPERSIZE=a4 and that should make pdf files with a4-sized pages. It apparently works. If one uses eps files as input files, ps2pdf puts the eps image directly to the border of the pdf file which gets cut off during printing. There should be some utilities to correct this.

ps2pdf versus pstill and password protection of pdf documents

While reading about ps2pdf (which is just a commandline front-end to ghostscript), I realized that despite its simple appearance, ps2pdf has almost all capabilities of Acrobat 5. ps2pdf14 outputs Acrobat 5-compatible files. According to the documentation strong password protection should be possible, however, I never managed with that.

In theory the following commands should work:

-sOwnerPassword= and -sUserPassword=

In order to set the key length to 128 you have to use
ps2pdf14 -dEncryptionR=3 -dKeylength=128