[OS X TeX] Distiller

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Sun, Jan 29, 2006 at 11:41:13AM +0100, Gerben Wierda wrote:
> On 28 Jan 2006, at 22:14, Maarten Sneep wrote:
> 
> >If you need the bounding box respected _and_ access to TeX fonts,  
> >you need epstopdf, unless the eps specifies the bounding box at the  
> >end of the file. Then you need to jump through hoops to get the  
> >conversion correct (I would advise to avoid tools that produce such  
> >output if possible).
> 
> If someone sends me a recursive EPS with (atend) (that is, an EPS  
> which itself has the Bbox atend and which uses %%BeginDocument  
> inclusion of another EPS which has atend) I would like to try to see  
> if an idea that I have works.
> 
> G 

Actually, I am writing a gui tool written in ruby/tk which should
handle eps/ps/pdf conversions, using ghostscript and optionally the
xpdf utilities.

I hesitate to mention it here, since I am a slow worker, and OS X
users are not the primary target. Nevertheless, I try to make it as
portable as possible.

========= (Non-techies: close your eyes) ===============

As to the mess of line endings: 

I read the entire eps file in one go, and split the string according
to /\r?\n|\n/ and parse all resulting strings. If I see a
%%BoundingBox: (atend) string then I scan from the end.

I fix the boundingbox in the usual way. Ghostscript gets
successively fed the fix, the eps file (which must be preview-less)
and a parameter `-c grestore'.

Of course, this algorithm will choke on very large eps files which
might still be manageable in a purely line-by-line way.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg
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