[tex-live] purifyeps not working

[Reinhard Kotucha]

On 10 November 2010 Karl Berry wrote:

 >        1) Remove purifyeps from TL.
 > 
 > That'd be ok by me.
 > 
 >        2) Include pstoedit in TL.  Why do you think it's not simple
 >           to do?
 > 
 > I realized later that "simple" wasn't the right word.
 > "Inappropriate" is the right word :).  We (I) don't want to provide
 > general-purpose non-TeX-related binaries (except for a minimal set
 > on Windows, not relevant here); TL is not an operating system.
 > E.g., we don't want to provide xpdf and its related utilities
 > either.
 > 
 >    3) Keep purifyeps in TL but without pstoedit.  
 > 
 > I don't have any particular objection to that, either, if it can be
 > made to work -- see Rolf's follow-up that I just forwarded to you.

Hi Karl,
I recently noticed that tex4ht depends on pstoedit already in order to
convert PostScript to SVG.  So I think that, as far as purifyeps is
concerned, it's best to keep it but issue an error message if pstoedit
isn't installed, just as Scott proposed.  On Linux it's quite easy to
install the pstoedit binary provided by the distribution.  Don't know
whether it's so easy on OS X too.

On Windows it would be nice to have a precompiled binary in TeX Live.  
But I suppose that it's not easy to provide one because it's linked
against some X11 libs and fontconfig.  So I'm not very optimistic.

Regards,
  Reinhard

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