[OS X TeX] Re: How to convert eps w/bounding box to pdf retaining Bbox info

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 10 août 06 à 17:02, Markus Hänchen a écrit :

>> I have discovered that the program Preview usually makes fairly  
>> good PDFs.  Simply open the EPS with Preview: it converts to a PDF  
>> and you can save the  result. YMMV.
>
> My Preview chokes on most (if by now not) eps sent to, i.e. it  
> keeps converting forever (or least for a few minutes until I give  
> up on it and force-quit it). It worked occasionally but could have  
> been even pre-Tiger.

There are essentially two ways to convert an EPS file to PDF on OS X:

- Open it in TeXShop (GUI version) or use /usr/local/teTeX/usr/local/ 
teTeX/bin/powerpc-apple-darwin-current/epstopdf (PPC CLI version) or / 
usr/local/teTeX/bin/i386-apple-darwin-current/epstopdf (Intel CLI  
version). epstopdf is a teTeX script invoking in turn the script /usr/ 
local/bin/ps2pdf, aka GhostScript's distiller.

- Open it in Preview (GUI version) or use /usr/bin/pstopdf (CLI  
version). pstopdf is Apple's Distiller.

Two remarks:

- Using the CLI versions allows the conversion of whole directories  
of EPS files, using for example:

	apply epstopdf .eps

or:

	apply pstopdf *.eps

- epstopdf can only process EPS files (hence single-page). ps2pdf and  
pstopdf can process PS files (of an arbitrary number of pages).

And two more:

- There are circumstances where GhostScript's distiller works while  
Apple's distiller doesn't, and there are also circumstances where  
Apple's distiller works while GhostScript's distiller doesn't. I've  
met both circumstances, but could never find any logic to it. Only  
thing: in my experience, PDFs produced by Apple's distiller work  
better with XeTeX than those produced by GhosScript's distiller;  
possibly a font embedding issue.

- People (including Peter Dyballa IIRC) have proposed scripts on this  
list, to use ps2pdf and later pdfcrop to fix bounding boxes, in case  
neither epstopdf nor pstopdf work. I didn't pay attention at the  
time, but you should be able to find the scripts by browsing the list  
archive. pdfcrop is available separately from CTAN at <http:// 
www.ctan.org/tex-archive/support/pdfcrop/>.

Gary Gray has also written a set of scripts, available at <http:// 
www.esm.psu.edu/mac-tex/PDF-Processing-Apps.zip>, among which "PDF  
Cropper.app". See <http://tug.org/pipermail/macostex-archives/2006- 
June/022561.html>. I don't remember whether pdfcrop is included in  
the .app bundle, or needs to be installed separately.

Hope this helps,

Bruno Voisin

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