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

From: Hendricks Trevor <Trevor.Hendricks@kohler.com>
Date: Thu Aug 14 2014 - 12:55:54 PDT

Just a piece, but are the fonts embedded in the EPS files? If not, starting with an export from Illustrator does sound like the only way to realistically go. If they are using a varied set of fonts that is not consistent amongst all their users you'll need to have all possible fonts installed on the processing computer if I'm not mistaken. Going between mac and pc in regards to fonts may be an issue as well.

From our experience I tried doing something similar but found that going to the source (IsoDraw in our case) I had a macro for saving that exported all possible files we needed to proper locations. As previously mentioned you could use actions to do similar. It's been user since I messed with Illustrator actions but if I recall they were pretty simple to setup and share amongst users.

Trevor Hendricks
Project Analyst -- Publication Systems
e: trevor.hendricks@kohler.com

(A)bort (R)etry (I)nfluence with large hammer.

-----Original Message-----
From: Xep-support [mailto:xep-support-bounces@renderx.com] On Behalf Of Eric J. Schwarzenbach
Sent: Thursday, August 14, 2014 2:46 PM
To: RenderX Community Support List
Subject: [xep-support] Re: eps into pdfs...options?

Thanks, Bob. We don't have Illustrator, though the client does.
Integrating it directly with the system we are using xep with is probably not an option, but having them do some bulk conversion could be.

But this is what they used for conversions in the past that they had problems with. I'm not entirely clear, but their conversion problems in the past had to do with different versions of Illustrator, mac vs pc illustrator, font files, etc. Whether Illustrator gives access to all the same rendering options as Distiller (and Ghostscript) or not, and whether they adequately explored all those options I don't know. I'm not sure that successful conversion is not possible this way, but the client has become very gun-shy about it.

Thanks,

Eric

On 08/14/2014 03:18 PM, Bob Stayton wrote:
> Adobe Illustrator can convert EPS to PDF or SVG.
> The process can be automated with "Actions".
>
> Bob Stayton
> Sagehill Enterprises
> bobs@sagehill.net
>
> On 8/14/2014 11:19 AM, Eric J. Schwarzenbach wrote:
>> 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
>>
>> ---------------------------------------------------------------------
>> -----
>>
>>
>> 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.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
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