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

[Gerben Wierda]

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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