Created attachment 7130 [details] simple shell script to make Ghostscript create a 50 page PDF with modified /DOCINFO pdfmark I'm re-testing the pdfmark operator functionality of Ghostscript. This is how I try to change the page labels of a 50 page PDF document. This document itself was created by a little shell script of mine using Ghostscript's pdfwrite device with the "/DOCINFO pdfmark" to change some meta data (which works perfectly). Anyway, here is how I tried to change the page labels: gs \ -o modified-pagelabels-50pages.pdf \ -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \ -c "[ /Page 1 /Label (i) /PAGELABEL pdfmark" \ -c "[ /Page 2 /Label (ii) /PAGELABEL pdfmark" \ -c "[ /Page 3 /Label (III) /PAGELABEL pdfmark" \ -c "[ /Page 4 /Label (four) /PAGELABEL pdfmark" \ -c "[ /Page 5 /Label (v) /PAGELABEL pdfmark" \ -c "[ /Page 6 /Label (FIVE) /PAGELABEL pdfmark" \ -f 50pages.pdf The bug I'm seeing is this: * Only the last called pdfmark operator is applied (in our example it is "FIVE"). * But this label is attached to page 1 instead attached to page 5. * All page labels for pages 2...50 are now empty (before, the labels seen were "2"..."50"). I also tried this variation of the commandline: gs \ -o modified-pagelabels-50pages.pdf \ -sDEVICE=pdfwrite \ -c "[ /Page 1 /Label (i) " \ -c " /Page 2 /Label (ii) " \ -c " /Page 3 /Label (III) " \ -c " /Page 4 /Label (four) " \ -c " /Page 5 /Label (v) " \ -c " /Page 6 /Label (FIVE) /PAGELABEL pdfmark" \ -f 50pages.pdf The result of his one: * The first page was labelled "i". * All page labels for pages 2...50 are also empty (in the original PDF the labels seen are "2"..."50"). Now there are 3 possibilities: 1. Maybe my way of trying to achieve page labelling is wrong because I didn't fully comprehend the specs. 2. Maybe Ghostscript isn't supposed to support the full pdfmark specification for page labels. 3. Maybe this is a genuine Ghostscript bug. (I tested with v8.71, v9.00 and v9.01svn on Linux). Please let me know which it is. In case of "1", please let me know how to make it right. In case of "2", please point me to a resource that describes the scope of Ghostscript's pdfmark support.
Nevermind case "2" from comment #1 -- meanwhile I found this useful piece of info: http://bugs.ghostscript.com/show_bug.cgi?id=690043#c2
The /PAGELABEL pdfmark does not have any /Page key, so one can set the label for the ‘current’ page only (and, as a consequence, only for one page at a time). Since you call it at the very beginning, it’s expected to set a label for the 1st page and only for it. Multiple /PAGELABELs for the same page: the pdfmark reference says the last one takes effect, so the result of your 1st commandline is OK. Note the /Page key is ignored. Multiple /Label keys in a single /PAGELABEL pdfmark: there’s nothing in the pdfmark reference to allow this. So your 2nd commandline example is incorrect. The result could be an explicit PostScript error, but in general pdfmarks are forgiving. In this case, the implementation assigns a page label, one of those you specified, but there’s no rule as to which one to choose. About page labels being 1..50 in the ‘old’ PDF: In short, they aren’t. My Adobe Reader (on Windows) displays page numbers as ‘<pageindex> of <totalpages>’ (where <pageindex> is the page’s 1-based index in the file) if there are no page labels in the PDF, and ‘<label> (<pageindex> of <totalpages>)’ if there are. Note the use of ‘()’. I get ’2 of 50’ with the old PDF, and ‘(2 of 50)’ with the new one. The PDF format does not provide any way to define labels for some pages and let the labels for the others ‘absolutely undefined’. Those ‘other’ labels must be set to something, ‘empty’ being the closest thing to ‘undefined’. How to set page labels from PostScript? I can think of 2 methods: (A) The 100% documented way: Issue a /PAGELABEL as part of each page. (B) The less documented way: Use low-level pdfmarks (/OBJ & co) to construct the /PabeLabels number tree and connect it to the document’s {Catalog}. The advantage is that you can define all page labels at once, and you can specify how to automatically generate these labels. For example you can request to ‘number pages 1..2 with the string "Page " followed by roman numerals starting at "x"’ instead of ‘label 1st page with the string "Page x", 2nd page with the string "Page xi"’. gswin32c -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOutputFile=50pages.pdf -dNOPAUSE GS>[/_objdef {pl} /type /dict /OBJ pdfmark GS>[{pl} <</Nums [0 <</P (Page ) /S /r /St 10>> 2 <<>>]>> /PUT pdfmark GS>[{Catalog} <</PageLabels {pl}>> /PUT pdfmark GS>50 { showpage } repeat GS>quit
SaGS analysis is correct, I believe. I seem to recall looking into this before. As to making this work; since the original file is a PDF file, you can run each page from the file individually. So you can set the PAGELABEL pdfmark for page 1, run page 1 from the original file, set the PAGELABEL for page 2, run page 2 from the original file and so on. Because the label is (as SaGS) said applied to the current page, this should correctly set the labels for each page in the output PDF file. (caveat: I haven't actually tried this) I'm less sure about constructing the PageLabels tree from scratch, but if it works, then its a reasonable way to proceed.