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How to Convert PDF Files to PostScript (PS) Online

Let's talk about a situation that anyone who has ever worked with a professional printing press might have run into. You've just finished designing a beautiful and an important document. It could be a glossy, high-end company brochure, a beautifully designed magazine, or maybe even a full-length book cover. You've carefully saved your final design as a high-quality, print-ready PDF, which you believe is the perfect, final format. But then, you get an email back from your printing company with a strange and a slightly confusing request: "This looks great, but could you please send us the PostScript file instead?"

In that moment, you probably think to yourself, "PostScript? What on earth is that? It sounds like something from the 1980s. Isn't a PDF good enough?"

And that's a perfectly reasonable question. But the truth is that in the high-end, precision-focused world of professional and commercial printing, PostScript is still a hugely important and, in many cases, a preferred language that is used to ensure a perfect, a consistent, and a flawless final print. So how do you turn your standard, everyday PDF into this special, printer-friendly format? Well, you do not need to go and buy some kind of an expensive and a complicated piece of design software. You can do it quickly, easily, and for free, with a simple online tool.

The Granddaddy of Digital Printing: What is PostScript?

Before we get into the easy solution, let's just take a quick and a fascinating trip back in time to understand what this mysterious "PostScript" thing actually is. PostScript, or PS, is what is known as a "page description language." It was first developed by the brilliant people at Adobe way, way back in the 1980s, and it completely revolutionized the entire world of digital printing.

The absolute best way to think about a PostScript file is to imagine that it is a very, very precise and a very detailed set of instructions that you are giving to a printer. In the same way that an HTML file tells a web browser exactly how to draw a page on a computer screen, a PostScript file tells a high-end printing press exactly where to place every single, tiny dot of ink, every single straight line, and every single, perfect character on a physical piece of paper. Its key and most powerful feature is that it is completely "device-independent." This means that a single PostScript file will be printed in the exact same way, with perfect and unerring fidelity, on any PostScript-compatible printer in the entire world, whether that is your simple, desktop laser printer or a massive, multi-million dollar, industrial printing press. It is this incredible consistency that is the reason why the pros still love it so much.

PDF vs. PostScript: The Family Feud

So, what is the relationship between the PDF that we all know and love and this older, more mysterious PostScript format? Well, you can actually think of them as being like a father and a son. The PDF format was, in fact, also developed by Adobe, and it was developed from the PostScript language.

A PDF is, at its core, a more modern, a much more compact, and a significantly more user-friendly "snapshot" of a PostScript file. The PDF was specifically designed and optimized for the purpose of viewing and of sharing documents on digital screens. PostScript, on the other hand, is the underlying, the more powerful, and the more direct language that was specifically designed for the actual, physical rendering process, especially when it comes to high-end and professional printing. So, while a high-quality PDF is often perfectly fine for most printing jobs, some professional print shops, and especially those that are using older, legacy systems or that have very specific and very precise workflows, will still prefer to work with the original, the raw, and the powerful PostScript instructions to be able to have the maximum possible control over the final, printed output.

The "Why": When Would You Need to Convert to PostScript?

So, if a PDF is just a more modern version of a PostScript file, why would you ever need to go backwards and convert your PDF into this older format? It usually comes down to a few, very specific, and very professional use cases.

The number one and the most common reason is for professional and for commercial printing. You are getting ready to print a high-quality art book, a glossy, full-color magazine, or a massive batch of corporate brochures for a big event. The professional print shop that you are working with might specifically request that you provide them with a .ps or an .eps (which stands for Encapsulated PostScript) file. They might do this to ensure that they get the most perfect and the most accurate color separations or to ensure that your layout is rendered with the absolute, maximum possible precision on their industrial-grade machines.

Another common reason is for working with legacy systems. You might be working with an older, but still very powerful and very expensive, piece of printing or plotting equipment that was built before the PDF format became the global standard. This older piece of equipment might only be able to understand the original PostScript language. And finally, in the world of academic and of scientific publishing, some academic journals or some university presses, and especially those that are dealing with publications that have a lot of very complex mathematical formulas or very detailed diagrams, will have their entire, end-to-end publishing workflow built around the PostScript format.

The Old Way: The Complicated "Print to File" Option

For many years, the only way for a normal person to be able to perform this conversion was to use a clunky and a not very intuitive, built-in feature on their computer. To be able to do this, you would first need to have a special "PostScript printer driver" installed on your computer, which is already a pretty technical and a confusing step for most people.

You would then have to open your PDF file in a program like Adobe Reader or Adobe Acrobat. You would then have to go to the "Print" menu. In the list of available printers, you would have to select the "Adobe PostScript" printer or a similar one. Then, you would have to hunt around for a little checkbox that said something like "Print to File." This would tell your computer to save the output as a new .ps file on your hard drive, instead of actually sending it to a physical printer. As you can imagine, this is not a very obvious or a very user-friendly process, and it requires you to have all of the right software and all of the right drivers correctly installed on your machine.

The Simple, Universal Solution: The PDF To PS Converter

This pressing need for a fast, for an easy, and for a completely and universally accessible way to be able to create these specialized and important, print-ready files is exactly why so many modern designers and so many other professionals now use an online PDF To PS Converter.

This type of tool is a simple but incredibly powerful web-based utility that does all of that complex and confusing conversion work for you, on its own, powerful servers. The workflow is an absolute dream. You just go to the website. You will see a big, clear button that says something like "Upload Your PDF File." You select the PDF from your device. You then just click the "Convert" button. The tool's powerful server will then use a sophisticated rendering engine to be able to translate your PDF document back into its foundational and its original PostScript language. A few moments later, it will give you a link to be able to download your brand-new and ready-to-print .ps file. And the fantastic thing is, with the kind of reliable and secure tools you can find on toolseel.com, you can handle this highly technical conversion from any device that has a web browser.

What to Look For in a Great PDF to PostScript Tool

As you begin to explore these wonderfully simple and useful tools, you'll find that the best and most trustworthy ones are designed to be fast, accurate, and, most importantly, to respect the privacy of your documents. A really top-notch online tool for converting your PDFs into PostScript files should have a few key features. It should include:

• A high-fidelity and an incredibly accurate conversion engine that perfectly and precisely preserves all of your original document's fonts, its images, and its layout information.
   
• The ability for the tool to be able to handle large and complex, multi-page PDF files without it crashing or giving you an error.
   
• A fast and an efficient conversion speed, so you are not sitting around and waiting for a long time for your final, print-ready file to be ready.
   
• A very strong and an unwavering commitment to your privacy and your security, which should be backed up by a very clear policy that states that all of your uploaded and your processed documents are permanently and automatically deleted from their servers after a very short period of time.
   
• A simple, a clean, and a very user-friendly interface that makes the entire, multi-step process of uploading and downloading your files completely foolproof.
   

A tool with these features is an invaluable asset for any modern design professional.

The Final Human Check: The Pre-Press Proof

Now for the golden rule, the part of the process that ensures that your final, expensive print run is absolutely perfect. The online tool will do a perfect, technical conversion of your file. But before you ever send that final file off to a professional printer and you prepare to spend a lot of money, you must do a final check.

If you can, the absolute best practice is to open up your new PostScript file in a compatible viewer. There are a number of great, free tools out there, like Ghostscript, that will allow you to do this. This is your chance to do a final, "digital proof" of the file. You should quickly scroll through it and you should check to make sure that all of the pages are there, that all of your fonts and your text are looking correct, and that none of your images or your graphical elements have accidentally shifted around on the page. This final, human, quality-control step is the thing that will ensure that you have a perfect print run and that you will be able to avoid any very costly mistakes. The tool does the conversion; you do the final proofread.

The Bridge Between Your Screen and the Printed Page

Let’s be honest, while the PDF is, without a doubt, the undisputed king of our modern, digital documents, the older and the more powerful PostScript format is still a vital and an essential language in the high-stakes world of professional and commercial printing.

An online converter is the fastest, the easiest, and the most accessible way to be able to bridge the gap between these two, closely related formats. It can help you to turn your screen-ready PDF into a perfectly formatted, print-ready PostScript file. So, don't ever let a technical, and a seemingly obscure, file format request from your professional printer slow down your important and your creative project. It is time to take control of your entire production workflow. By using a simple online tool to convert your PDFs to PostScript, you can ensure that your beautiful, digital designs are translated with perfect and with unerring accuracy for the final, printed page. It is the smart, the simple, and the professional way to be able to bridge the gap between the digital and the physical world.