I'm trying to scan some documents so I can throw away my paper copies. I've sucessfully scanned the documents to PostScript format, and the files have a bounding box. If I open the files in evince, the page size is correct - it shows just the scanned image.

However, when I run ps2pdf to convert it to pdf (because it's *much* smaller as a pdf, I think due to image compression), when I open the resulting pdf in evince, it's put it on what looks like an A4 page.

Two questions:

1. Why isn't ps2pdf paying any attention to the BoundingBox directives?
2. How can I fix it?

Regards
David Gee

does ps2pdf -sPAPERSIZE=letter myfile.ps make any difference ?

Yup, that does work but it's not what I'm after. Because the PS document is coming from a scan, it's not always a regular paper size, as sometimes I only need to scan part of a document. What I'm after is an option that will read the bounding box from the PS file and convert it into the PDF page size.

From all the info I have seen ps2pdf is SUPPOSED to default to letter size paper, so the first thing I have to say is I have no idea why yours wasn't... I did not find anything that mentioned a way for ps2pdf to automatically select the size of paper based on the document size. Interesting thought though..

maybe you can parse the ps file for the page size using a script then insert that size into the -sPAPERSIZE= field....

-dEPSCrop can probably help you

yep! many thanks zmi007