JonasBernard / pdflatex-clean

A python script that creates clean LaTeX-PDFs without active contents.

pdflatex-clean

A python script that creates clean LaTeX-PDFs without active contents.

When you create a PDF with pdflatex, you may have recognized some of these issues:

• You cannot upload a PDF of e.g. letters or your CV to careers website or other websites due to 'active contents'
• Selecting text and math equations in the output PDF is a horrible mess

The solution

pdflatex-clean is a solution to both of these problems. It executes the pdf conversion process using pdflatex with all arguments given and then creates a clean PDF file using GhostScript.

Prerequisites

You will need the following things to use pdflatex-clean:

• A Linux machine (please report if the code also works on Windows or Mac)
• A working TeX installation (preferably Tex Live) with pdflatex binary available in your $PATH variable.
• A working GhostScript installation with gs binary available in your $PATH variable
• A working Python 3 installation with working pip for installation

Installation

The simplest and currently only way to install pdflatex-clean is to use pip:

pip install https://github.com/JonasBernard/pdflatex-clean/archive/main.zip

Usage

You can use pdflatex-clean the same way you use pdflatex. All aguments will be passed to pdflatex.

Exceptions:

• -interaction flag will always be set to nonstopmode
• -output-format flag will always be set to pdf

pdflatex-clean myTexFile.tex

will create a myTexFile.pdf from myTexFile.tex.

Licensing

A python script that creates clean LaTeX-PDFs without active contents. Copyright (C) 2020 Jonas Bernard

This program is free software: you can redistribute it and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public License as published by the Free Software Foundation, either version 3 of the License, or (at your option) any later version.

This program is distributed in the hope that it will be useful, but WITHOUT ANY WARRANTY; without even the implied warranty of MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE. See the GNU General Public License for more details.

You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License along with this program. If not, see https://www.gnu.org/licenses/.