[OS X TeX] OT: looking for a public-domain EPS file editor
Gerben Wierda
Gerben.Wierda at rna.nl
Tue May 1 10:47:52 CEST 2007
Hi Bruno,
can you send me the erroneous file (with the initmatrix command in it)?
I was thinking about improving epstopdf so it can at least warn and
possibly repair this kind of illegal EPSF.
G
On Apr 25, 2007, at 11:28, 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).
>
> The long story: how
> ===================
>
> After some search I found Inkscape <http://www.inkscape.org/>, already
> mentioned on this list IIRC and which is precisely a public-domain
> vectorial graphics editor, meant as an alternative to Illustrator. And
> there's a Mac OS X version, running as a stand-alone executable
> (actually calling X11).
>
> Alas, Inkscape works with the SVG format, not the EPS format. It is
> said to be able to import and export other formats, including EPS.
> Apparently this functionality requires pstoedit, for which an
> i-Package exists. However:
>
> - pstoedit, as installed by i-Installer, doesn't seem to know about
> SVG. From "pstoedit -help":
>
>> Available formats :
>> psf: .fps: Flattened PostScript (no
>> curves) (built-in)
>> -------------------------------------------
>> ps: .spsc: Simplified PostScript with
>> curves (built-in)
>> -------------------------------------------
>> debug: .dbg: for test purposes
>> (built-in)
>> -------------------------------------------
>> dump: .dbg: for test purposes (same as
>> debug) (built-in)
>> -------------------------------------------
>> gs: .gs: any device that GhostScript
>> provides - use gs:format, e.g. gs:pdfwrite (built-in)
>> -------------------------------------------
>> ps2ai: .ai: Adobe Illustrator via
>> ps2ai.ps of GhostScript (built-in)
>> -------------------------------------------
>
> - Even if it did, there's no indication in Inkscape's doc on how to
> interface pstoedit with Inkscape.
>
> Any idea?
>
> Bruno Voisin
>
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