I've been trying to find a way to create a simple PDF page from the terminal that contains only one string, for example, "Prelude".

Some background: I use pdfunite to join music charts together into a single PDF. Here's an example:

 pdfunite Welcome.pdf Rooftops.pdf Announcements.pdf ChildrensPrayer.pdf ComeAliveDryBones.pdf Benediction.pdf Dismissal.pdf ~/Desktop/2016-03-12.pdf

What I am trying to find is a way to create custom sheets in the final PDF all in one single command, similar to this:

pdfunite Welcome.pdf (enscript "Have a seat" - | ps2pdf - output.pdf) Rooftops.pdf Announcements.pdf ComeAliveDryBones.pdf Benediction.pdf Dismissal.pdf ~/Desktop/2016-03-12.pdf

In essence, creating a PDF that contains text "Have a seat" on the fly and inserting it into the correct spot of the final document.

Is this possible?

Tl;dr

pdfunite may error out in case the file descriptor containing the standard output of the command running inside the command substitution is empty by the time it's read.

So you're better off using an alternative to pdfunite; since you have ghostscript installed you could use gs:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=~/Desktop/2016-03-12.pdf Welcome.pdf <(enscript <<<"echo foo" -p -) Rooftops.pdf Announcements.pdf ComeAliveDryBones.pdf Benediction.pdf Dismissal.pdf

If I understood correctly you were pretty close:

pdfunite Welcome.pdf <(enscript <<<"Have a seat" -p - | ps2pdf - -) Rooftops.pdf Announcements.pdf ComeAliveDryBones.pdf Benediction.pdf Dismissal.pdf ~/Desktop/2016-03-12.pdf

The <<<"Have a seat" token in the enscript command will redirect enscript's standard input to the string and the -p - token will make the enscript command print to standard output;

Using <() instead of () will make the whole <() token be replaced with the file descriptor containing the standard output of the command running inside <() (AKA process substitution), using - instead of output.pdf will make ps2pdf print the PDF to standard output instead of to a file.

But the problem with this approach is that pdfunite may error out in case the file descriptor containing the standard output of the command running inside the command substitution is empty by the time it's read.

So you're better off using an alternative to pdfunite; since you have ghostscript installed you could use gs:

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=~/Desktop/2016-03-12.pdf Welcome.pdf <(enscript <<<"echo foo" -p -) Rooftops.pdf Announcements.pdf ComeAliveDryBones.pdf Benediction.pdf Dismissal.pdf

% enscript <<<"foo" -p -  | ps2pdf - foo.pdf 

[ 1 page * 1 copy ] left in -

% gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=foobar.pdf foo.pdf <(enscript <<<"bar" -p -)

[ 1 page * 1 copy ] left in -

GPL Ghostscript 9.16 (2015-03-30)

Copyright (C) 2015 Artifex Software, Inc.  All rights reserved.

This software comes with NO WARRANTY: see the file PUBLIC for details.

Processing pages 1 through 1.

Page 1

Loading NimbusMon-Bol font from /usr/share/ghostscript/9.16/Resource/Font/NimbusMon-Bol... 4726404 3142423 2470576 1091522 3 done.

Loading NimbusMon-Reg font from /usr/share/ghostscript/9.16/Resource/Font/NimbusMon-Reg... 4759732 3269347 2490768 1100127 3 done.

%

gs -dBATCH -dNOPAUSE -sDEVICE=pdfwrite -sOUTPUTFILE=foobar.pdf foo.pdf <(enscript <<<"bar" -p -) correctly chains foo.pdf and a document containing the word "bar" generated via the PostScript script generated by enscript <<<"bar" -p -.

I feel badly not accepting the answer suggested by @kos but I could not get it to work, and I preferred to continue with the simplicity of pdfunite. @kos helped me to understand enscript (THANKS!)

My final solution was to write a bash script to create the temporary PDF files, then string them together using pdfunite.

The command is issued as follows:

./charts.bash -o=output-filename.pdf ./AlmostThere.pdf ./Breathe.pdf -c="The Gospel According to Matthew" ./Doxology.pdf -c="Closing Prayer"

Here's the bash script (I'm a novice, go easy)

#!/bin/bash

CHARTS=()

DELETEAFTER=()

for i in "$@"

do

    case $i in

        -o=*|--output=*)

        OUTPUT="${i#*=}"

    ;;

        -c=*|--create=*)

        NEWFILENAME="${i#*=}"

        NEWFILENAME=${HOME}/Desktop/${NEWFILENAME//[[:space:]]/}.pdf

        enscript <<<"${i#*=}" -p - --no-header --font=Courier25 --margins=20:20:200:0 | ps2pdf - $NEWFILENAME

        CHARTS+=("$NEWFILENAME")

    ;;

        *)

         # unknown option

        CHARTS+=("${i#*=}")

        DELETEAFTER+=("$NEWFILENAME");

    ;;

    esac

done

pdfuniteString=$(printf " %s" "${CHARTS[@]}")

pdfuniteString=${pdfuniteString:1}

wait

pdfunite $pdfuniteString ${HOME}/Desktop/${OUTPUT}

wait

for i in "${DELETEAFTER[@]}"

do

    if [ -n "$i" ]; then

        rm "$i"

    fi

done

echo Complete

I am trying to create a small PDF file with page size just matching the text, ie a little label-sized PDF. I think that objective matches this question as stated. In one line, this can be done as follows:

echo "foobar" | enscript --no-header -p out.ps && ps2pdf out.ps && pdfcrop out.pdf out.pdf

This results in a little file that looks like this: