Calling ghostscript from a script produces error

Question

I'm trying to automate some post-processing on scanned PDF documents. One tool I found was ghostscript that would compress the scanned images nicely. However when I try to call gs from inside my python script it fails miserably:

Error: /undefinedfilename in (/tmp/step-02-1.pdf)
Operand stack:

Execution stack:
   %interp_exit   .runexec2   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   2   %stopped_push   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   --nostringval--   false   1   %stopped_push
Dictionary stack:
   --dict:1164/1684(ro)(G)--   --dict:0/20(G)--   --dict:77/200(L)--
Current allocation mode is local
Last OS error: 2
GPL Ghostscript 9.05: Unrecoverable error, exit code 1

The command line I'm trying to run is

gs -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -dCompatibilityLevel=1.5 -dPDFSETTINGS=/screen\
   -dSAFER -dNOPAUSE -dQUIET -dBATCH -sOutputFile=/tmp/step-03-1.pdf\
   /tmp/step-02-1.pdf

Since this is a python script, I tried both os.system and os.popen to execute it, but to no avail. If I run the above command line from the shell it all works. Any idea where my error could be?

KenS · Accepted Answer · 2013-11-16 16:03:16Z

2

Well Ghostscript can't find the file, have you tried something simple like 'ls /tmp/step-02-1.pdf' instead of invoking GS ?

Does that work ?

answered Nov 16, 2013 at 16:03

KenS

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5 Comments

cdecker Over a year ago

Yes, the file is definitely there. What really concerns me is that when run from the shell, the command runs correctly without any problems.

KenS Over a year ago

I don't doubt the file is there, but possibly the Python environment is running in a way which masks it, which is why I suggest executing something simple like 'ls'

KenS Over a year ago

D'oh try running without -dSAFER

cdecker Over a year ago

Tried running without -dSAFER and the file is being created by python in a previous instruction, but I'll try for completeness.

cdecker Over a year ago

Ah, you were right, I was post-processing the files asynchronously, and the output from the previous step was not finished when I called ghostscript.

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