[xep-support] Re: eps into pdfs...options?

Eric:

See below for my input.

Kevin

From: Xep-support [mailto:xep-support-bounces@renderx.com] On Behalf Of Eric J. Schwarzenbach
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2014 11:19 AM
To: RenderX Community Support List
Subject: [xep-support] eps into pdfs...options?

Hi,

This email is kind of long, so I want to preface it with a short list of the questions I'm looking for answers to or advice regarding.

1) Any advice / best options for converting eps files to make them renderable to PDF? (ghostscript vs pstoedit, vs uniconverter vs ...?)

I have had some success with EPS to PDF via Ghostscript but have not tested or run other products. Maybe Imagemagick would also do this.

2) If I convert the eps to pdf, to embed that pdf image during xep rendering, is there any way to make xep use the image bounding box of the image instead of the page size as the image bounding box?

To this I am bit confused. When you convert the EPS to PDF, you should do it so that the EPS image *is* the PDF page size. I am not a ghostscript expert but at one time I did do this. I think it is a matter of setting the correct flags to crop the EPS to the bounding box size and then setting the paper size to that same size.

See http://stackoverflow.com/questions/14595521/how-to-set-the-physical-size-of-pdf-pages-with-ghostscript

3) Am I likely to have more difficulty getting an exact rendering, converting to SVG as opposed to PDF (or to a raster format)?

Well, that would I guess depend on the quality of the EPS to SVG conversion. That being said, if you get excellent results like this then I would use SVG because it works in all output.

4) Any other approaches I'm missing?

If anyone has advice relevant to any of these items, I'd much appreciate hearing it (and there's additional relevant details below).

Thanks,

Eric

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We've been struggling with the need to use eps files in pdf renderings. A client of ours has a massive quantity of hi res art which they've produced in illustrator and have saved as eps for sending to printers and use in other systems. While they want to move to svg in the long run, it will be a while before they will be able convert / re-export all these files and make sure they still look right. They've been burned before by conversions that don't render things quite the same way, mucking up font positioning and such.

My understanding is that xep cannot handle eps files when rendering to pdf, or rather it only uses the embedded preview tif, which in this client's case is not only poor quality, but causes the xep rendering to fail catastrophically with an "alpha channel unsupported" error. Re-exporting all their art with better tiffs is not really an option either.

So we're looking at conversion options. Ghostscript seems to do a pretty good job of rendering to raster formats, so this at least is a fallback for us, but they would really like to have resolution independent graphics in their pdfs. Ghostscript also seems to offer a ton of rendering options including distiller options, so I would guess we can replicate whatever options the client needs to duplicate the image rendering they get with whatever version of illustrator they generated these with. (Actually using distiller might be another fall back.)

So converting to PDF might be an option, as ghostscript seems to also produce a reasonable pdf. However the PDF seems to want to be a page, and we really need these to be the proper image size of each individual image. It's not clear to me if there is a way to do a ghostscript conversions where the page size is determined by the image dimensions. Alternately it's not clear to me if the bounding box of the image is preserved in the PDF and if so, whether that is something renderx can be made to use. In initial experiments renderx seems to use the page size as the bounding box of the image.

Converting to SVG is another possibility. I've been playing with pstoedit and can get svgs out of that, though it does not seem to have much in the way of eps rendering options. I started looking at uniconverter also, and if I can ever figure out how to install their plugin for svg support that might be another option.

!DSPAM:87,53ecfdc110101929986242!

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Received on Thu Aug 14 19:39:52 2014