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

[Bruno Voisin]

Le 25 avr. 07 à 13:20, William Adams a écrit :

> Cenon is the closest thing. http://www.cenon.info --- not PD, but GPL
> or some similarly open license.
>
> For just doing the bounding box, you're probably best off making
> the .eps into a .pdf, then cropping that, some of the pdf viewers for
> NeXTstep afforded this functionality if memory serves, or printing to
> a .pdf set to the desired size, or using TeXshop's select-clipping-
> drag functionality, then convert the pdf back into a .eps (keep the
> original, since this sort of thing makes editing awkward).

Thanks Will, I wasn't aware of the existence of that tool. However,  
it doesn't seem to work here: any EPS file that I try to open shows  
up as an empty white box.

Maybe this is due to the fact that the EPS files I tried had been  
created by Adobe Illustrator CS 2 Mac, and hence have Mac-style EOLs,  
but I didn't have time to investigate.


Le 25 avr. 07 à 13:47, Siep Kroonenberg a écrit :

> 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.

Many many thanks! That's exactly what I was looking for:

- It's cross-platform.

- It crops EPS files intelligently, in situations where pdfcrop  
fails, by removing unnecessary invisible objects.

- It has a GUI.

- It can use EPS as input and EPS as output, directly without  
requiring the user to perform pre- or post-processing involving PDF.

- The resulting EPS code seems to be the original EPS code with only  
the unnecessary objects removed, instead of the result of successive  
conversions EPS -> PDF -> PDF -> EPS.

The installation may seem a bit convoluted to OS X users at first,  
hence I'm summarizing it here to encourage people to give it a try:

- Get the xpdf tools from <http://users.phg-online.de/tk/MOSXS/>.  
Meaning, as of this writing, get <http://users.phg-online.de/tk/MOSXS/ 
xpdf-tools-3.dmg>. After mounting the disk image, install the tools  
using xpdf-tools.pkg.

- Get the epspdf scripts from <http://tex.aanhet.net/epspdf/>.  
Meaning, as of this writing, get <http://tex.aanhet.net/epspdf/epspdf. 
0.2.12.tgz>. Uncompress and untar the archive, move the epspdf  
directory so created to, say, /Applications/.

- Get the AppleScript applet epspdf.app from the same location.  
Meaning, as of this writing, get <http://tex.aanhet.net/epspdf/ 
epspdf_app.0.2.01.zip>. Unzip the archive, move the content of the  
epspdf_applescript directory so created to /Applications/epspdf/.  
(Move the content of epspdf_applescript, not the directory itself,  
since epspdf.app and epspdf.rb etc. need to be in the same directory.)

That's all! You can just double-click epspdf.app in the Finder, and  
you'll be presented with a nice and no-nonsense GUI. The option to  
remove unnecessary invisible objects corresponds to the checkbox  
"Compute tight boundingbox".

I didn't try the following myself, but it seems you can make the same  
functionality available from the command-line (instead of the applet)  
by creating a script epspdf containing:

#!/bin/sh
/Applications/epspdf/epspdf.rb $*

and a script epspdftk containing:

#!/bin/sh
/Applications/epspdf/epspdftk.rb $*

then placing them in your path (in /usr/local/bin/, say) and using  
chmod to make them executable. See <http://tex.aanhet.net/epspdf/>  
for details.

Thanks for your help, an hope this helps others,

Bruno Voisin
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