[OS X TeX] TeXShop 2.07

[Maarten Sneep]

On 13 Jan 2006, at 12:20, Peter Dyballa wrote:

> Am 13.01.2006 um 00:10 schrieb Maarten Sneep:
>
>> Imagine a path, say a circle. Take a stroke with thickness 10 pt,  
>> just to exaggerate. The line will extend 5 pt beyond the path, and  
>> this is where many tools go wrong. If cropping isn't needed, I  
>> want to leave it out.
>
> I drew a little circle in PS, converted it with ps2eps to EPS and  
> converted this file to PDF with two means:

I did some tests with your figure, converting it by hand to eps to  
ensure that the bounding box in the eps figure is correct, and I  
arrive at different conclusions. If pdfcrop isn't needed, it should  
be left out of a workflow. It is hard to get it right, and many tools  
are off by a few points.

I changed some small things to ensure I _really_ knew the true  
bounding box.

%%BoundingBox: 0 0 230 230
%%HiResBoundingBox: 0.000000 0.000000 230.000000 230.000000
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% 
%%%%%%%%%%
30 .25 .75 115 115 100 Kreis
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%% 
%%%%%%%%%%

I also made a true ps version, and translated it to eps with ps2eps,  
and guess what: its boundingbox is wrong, it is slightly too small (I  
took the same sized circle, but offset by a few points to, so the x- 
size and y-size are what matters):
%%BoundingBox: 85 85 315 315
%%HiResBoundingBox: 85.000000 85.500000 314.500000 315.000000

The crude box is OK, but the high-res is off. Once the eps has the  
wrong box, there isn't much the rest of the toolchain can do. My own  
figure with either pstopdf or epstopdf are fine.

> epstopdf.pdf looks in TeXShop 2.08 clipped at the rightmost edge ...

It is, but that is because it was clipped by ps2eps. My integer  
number hides that, but if you take a look at the bounding box in your  
original files (both normal and high-res) you'll see that they are  
off by 1 or 0.5 point.

> Maarten, I'll send you the sources off-list! Maybe it's worth to  
> create two little droplets that convert elder EPS property this or  
> that way and invoke TeXShop to view the result?

I don't quite get what sequence you have in mind here. It is clear to  
me that cropping is a problem that is pretty hard to resolve in a  
satisfactory manner, and should be left out if at all possible. Given  
the correct bounding box, epstopdf will work just fine, do not touch  
it. As far as I can see, it is the preferred tool, if you like open  
source, or where the Apple Distiller is not available.

Where pstopdf is available, I think it might be slightly more robust  
than the ghostview engine (it is after all the Adobe distiller).

If your tool can only produce ps, and not eps, you have to be careful  
how it handles the bounding box, the tools that are available may all  
do this incorrectly. Hit the developer of your tools with enough  
requests to get that fixed - the tool that exports your graph, that is.

Maarten
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