[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 ...?)

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?

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

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 18:33:44 2014