Convert Your First PS File in Under 10 Minutes
Before You Start
This guide assumes you have already requested a free trial of Adobe PDF Converter SDK and received your activation credentials from Datalogics. If you have not done that yet, start at the product page and submit the free trial form. There is no credit card required and the turnaround for trial access is typically same-day during business hours.
Once you have your credentials, this guide will get you from download to your first successful PS-to-PDF conversion in under 10 minutes.
Step 1: Download the SDK Package for Your Platform
Adobe PDF Converter SDK is available for Windows (32-bit and 64-bit), Linux (RHEL 7 and compatible distributions), and macOS (Intel and Apple Silicon). Download the correct package for your development environment from the Datalogics customer portal using your trial credentials.
The download includes the SDK libraries, the apcif.h header file that defines the C API, required supporting libraries (ACE, CoolType, AGM, JP2K), and the democonverter reference implementation. The democonverter is the most important part of the package for getting started quickly and it is the first thing you should look at after unpacking.
Step 2: Unpack and Orient Yourself
After unpacking the SDK, the directory structure will include a lib folder containing the SDK and supporting libraries, and include a folder containing apcif.h, and a democonverter folder containing the reference implementation source code, a prebuilt executable, and sample PostScript files.
Start with the democonverter folder. The prebuilt executable means you do not need to compile anything to run your first conversion. The source code in the same folder shows you exactly how the SDK is initialized, configured, and invoked, which is the fastest way to understand the API pattern before you begin your own integration.
Step 3: Run democonverter Against a Sample File
The democonverter executable accepts a PostScript file as input and produces a PDF as output. To run your first conversion, open a terminal, navigate to the democonverter directory, and invoke the executable with a sample PS file from the samples directory included in the package.
On Windows, the command follows the pattern: democonverter.exe input.ps output.pdf
On Linux and macOS, the equivalent command is: ./democonverter input.ps output.pdf
The expected output is a PDF file in the same directory as your output path. Open it and verify it looks correct. If the conversion succeeds on the sample file, the SDK libraries are correctly installed and accessible on your system.
If you see an error about missing libraries, confirm that the SDK lib directory is in your system's library path (LD_LIBRARY_PATH on Linux, DYLD_LIBRARY_PATH on macOS, PATH on Windows). The SDK documentation includes platform-specific setup instructions for library path configuration.
Step 4: Run democonverter Against Your Own PostScript Files
Once the sample conversion succeeds, run democonverter against PostScript or EPS files from your own workflow. This is the most important validation step in the trial process. Sample files that ship with an SDK are designed to convert cleanly. Your production PostScript files may have characteristics that reveal rendering differences between conversion engines.
Pay attention to font rendering, color accuracy, and any complex transparency or shading in the output. If you have reference PDFs generated by Acrobat Distiller or another trusted conversion path, compare the democonverter output against those references. For most PostScript files, the output quality will be equivalent or identical because both share the same Adobe Distiller core.
Step 5: Understand the initialize-configure-convert Pattern
Before integrating the SDK into your application, spend 15 minutes reading through the democonverter source code. The SDK follows a consistent three-stage pattern that all integrations use regardless of the application architecture.
Initialization sets up the SDK environment. This involves specifying the path to the SDK libraries and supporting font resources, setting up the job options environment, and preparing the conversion engine. Initialization is performed once at application startup, not once per conversion. Re-initializing for each conversion adds significant overhead; the correct pattern is to initialize once and hold the context for the lifetime of the processing pipeline.
Configuration sets the parameters for a specific conversion job. Distiller parameters control output quality, PDF version, compression settings, color management, and font embedding behavior. These parameters can be set from a Distiller parameter file (a standard PostScript settings format) or programmatically via the API. The democonverter source shows examples of both approaches.
Conversion executes the job. The SDK takes the input source (a file path or a custom input callback for stream-based architectures), the configured job options, and an output destination (a file path or a custom output callback), and produces the PDF. Error handling during conversion is managed through return codes and an optional error callback that the SDK invokes if problems occur during processing.
Step 6: Configure Job Options for Your Use Case
The default job options configured in democonverter produce general-purpose PDF output. For most integration projects, you will want to customize the job options to match your specific requirements.
Common configuration decisions include PDF version target (PDF 1.4 through PDF 2.0), whether to embed all fonts or subset-embed, color management settings and ICC profile paths, whether to produce full-document PDF, single-page streams, or multi-page streams, and PDF/X-4 compliance settings for prepress output. Each of these is controlled through Distiller parameter settings that the SDK exposes through the apcif.h API.
The SDK documentation includes a complete Distiller parameter reference. For teams migrating from an existing Distiller-based workflow, your existing Distiller settings files can be used directly, which significantly reduces the configuration work required to match your current output quality and settings.
What to Do When You Have Questions
The democonverter source code and the SDK documentation cover the most common integration questions. For integration questions that go beyond what the documentation addresses, engineering support is available. This is one of the meaningful practical differences between an open-source tool and a commercial SDK: when you hit an edge case in production, there is an engineering team available to help you resolve it.
The Adobe PDF Converter free trial gives you full access to the SDK and documentation with no time limit on the evaluation period. Take the time to test against your real PostScript files, validate output quality, and design your integration architecture before making a licensing decision.