Is there a free/open-source application that runs on Linux, where I can specify a multi-page PDF as input, then specify a page number, and then obtain a rendering of that page in color - as well as rendering of each of the cyan, magenta, yellow and black color separations? (not sure if this is called a "preflight" software for printing). Additionally, it would be great if this application could calculate the total (and which) of pages that are purely black&white (i.e. have content only on the K/black separation), and which have color content.
For a single page PDF, it is relatively easy to use ghostscript
from the command line; as an example, with this Latex code, test.tex
:
\documentclass{standalone}
\usepackage{tikz}
\begin{document}
\begin{tikzpicture}
\draw[fill=none,draw=black,line width=2pt] (0cm,0cm) rectangle (4cm,5cm);
\draw[fill=red] (1cm,1cm) circle (1cm) ;
\draw[fill=blue] (2cm,2.5cm) circle (1cm) ;
\draw[fill=green] (3cm,4cm) circle (1cm) ;
\end{tikzpicture}
\end{document}
... and compiling it with pdflatex test.tex
, one gets test.pdf
, which looks like this:
...and it can be split to CMYK separations using:
gs -sDEVICE=tiffsep -dNOPAUSE -dBATCH -dSAFER -r150x150 -sOutputFile=test%04d.tif test.pdf
... which generates test0001.Cyan.tif
, test0001.Magenta.tif
, test0001.Yellow.tif
and test0001.Black.tif
, which look like this (click for full res):
... but clearly, this process is kinda tedious to do for a 400+ page PDF, which is why I'd prefer a GUI - even if it is just an interface to a Ghostscript command line.
Is there anything like that out there?