pdf2dsc

pdf2dsc [options] PDF-file [DSC-file]

-v
    Set verbose mode (output page numbers while processing).

-p
    Output page bounding boxes (page size) in DSC comments.

-s
    Output a simplified DSC file.
This is useful for large PDF files. Only output the header and page structure. No other document info is included.

-q
    Do not print any output

PDF-file
    The input PDF file to convert.

DSC-file
    The output DSC file. If not specified, the DSC file is written to standard output.

The `pdf2dsc` command is a utility used to create a PostScript Document Structuring Convention (DSC) file from a PDF (Portable Document Format) file. This DSC file serves as an index or table of contents for the PDF, describing the structure of the PDF document in PostScript terms. It's mainly useful for tools that process or manipulate PDF documents based on their structure, like imposition software or specialized PDF converters. By creating a DSC file, these tools can more easily navigate and extract specific pages or sections from the PDF without fully interpreting the PDF's internal format. The `pdf2dsc` utility essentially translates the PDF's internal organization into a DSC-compliant description that other PostScript-aware applications can understand. It is a part of the `poppler-utils` package, a collection of PDF utilities based on the Poppler PDF rendering library.

The generated DSC is only an index of the PDF content and does not contain the PDF content itself. Also, the usefulness of the generated DSC file is dependent on the tool used to further process the PDF.

The DSC file produced by `pdf2dsc` contains PostScript comments that describe the structure of the input PDF. These comments include information about the number of pages, page boundaries, and other metadata. The output can be redirected to a file or piped to other utilities.

pdf2dsc is part of the Poppler library's utilities. It was created to provide a simple method to access and utilize the page information of a PDF file and integrate PDF content within workflows that use PostScript formats. As PDF has become a more popular document format, the need for integrating with older PostScript workflows became important, and pdf2dsc helps bridge that gap.

pdfinfo(1), pdftops(1), pdfdetach(1)