[OS X TeX] OT: looking for a public-domain EPS file editor

[Siep Kroonenberg]

On Wed, Apr 25, 2007 at 11:28:44AM +0200, Bruno Voisin wrote:
> The short story
> ===============
> 
> Is anybody aware of a public-domain EPS file editor, offering similar  
> functionality to Adobe Illustrator and running on Linux?
> 
> The long story: why
> ===================
> 
> Yesterday a student of my research lab asked about ways to crop an  
> EPS file, removing unwanted white space around a figure (the  
> streamlines of a flow) produced by Tecplot on Linux.
> 
> I first thought about pdfcrop, part of MacTeX and gwTeX.  
> Unfortunately, applied to the EPS file (after conversion to PDF) it  
> produced no visible effect.
> 
> Looking at the EPS file with Illustrator, it turns out there is  
> nothing to crop: the content of the file is delimited by a large  
> frame (an invisible rectangle), inside which there are lots of white  
> space and the actual figure.
> 
> With Illustrator it's easy to solve this, by ungrouping the content  
> of the EPS file then erasing the unwanted rectangle. But the student  
> works on Linux and has no access to Illustrator, other than asking me.
> 
> He had tried to edit the BoundingBox comment directly in the EPS  
> code, but that wasn't successful. And we tried to identify in this  
> code the part creating the unwanted rectangle, so as to remove it,  
> but the code seems so optimized that it is absolutely undecipherable  
> (at least to us).

epspdf has a cropping option, using ghostscript's boundingbox output
device, which ignores `unpainted' and white objects when computing
the boundingbox. epspdf supports converting back and forth between
eps and pdf and is available from CTAN.

-- 
Siep Kroonenberg

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