1PS2EPS(1) PS2EPS(1)
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6 ps2eps - convert PostScript to EPS (Encapsulated PostScript) files
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9 ps2eps [ -f ] [ -q ] [ -N ] [ -O ] [ -n ] [ -P ] [ -c ] [ -C ] [ -m ] [
10 -B ] [ -E ] [ -s pagedim ] [ -t offset ] [ -r resolution ] [ -R +|-|^ ]
11 [ -l ] [ -g ] [ -H ] [ -d ] [ -h|--help ] [ -a ] [ -W ] [ -L ] [
12 -V|--version ] [ -- ] [ psfile1 ] [ psfile2 ] [ ... ]
13
16 This manual page documents ps2eps version 1.68.
17 ps2eps is a tool (written in Perl) to produce Encapsulated PostScript
19 Files (EPS/EPSF) from usual one-paged Postscript documents. It calcu‐
20 lates correct Bounding Boxes for those EPS files and filters some spe‐
21 cial postscript command sequences that can produce erroneous results on
22 printers. EPS files are often needed for including (scalable) graphics
23 of high quality into TeX/LaTeX (or even Word) documents.
24 Without any argument, ps2eps reads from standard input and writes to
26 standard output. If filenames are given as arguments they are pro‐
27 cessed one by one and output files are written to filenames with exten‐
28 sion .eps. If input filenames have the extension .ps or .prn, this
29 extension is replaced with .eps. In all other cases .eps is appended
30 to the input filename. Please note that PostScript files for input
31 should contain only one single page (you can possibly use the psselect
32 from the psutils package to extract a single page from a document that
33 contains multiple pages).
34 If BoundingBox in output seems to be wrong, please try options --size
36 or --ignoreBB. See also section TROUBLESHOOTING.
37
39 ps2eps follows the usual GNU command line syntax, with long options
40 starting with two dashes (`-'). A summary of options is included
41 below.
42 -h, --help
44 Show summary of options.
45 -V, --version
47 Show version of program.
48 -f, --force
50 Force overwriting existing files. ps2eps will not overwrite
51 files by default to avoid deleting original EPS files acci‐
52 dently.
53 -q, --quiet
55 quiet operation (no output while processing files, except
56 errors).
57 -N, --noinsert
59 do not insert any postscript code. Normally a few postscript
60 instructions are added around the original postscript code by
61 ps2eps which can be turned off by this option.
62 -O, --preserveorientation
64 do not filter %%Orientation: header comment.
65 -n, --nofix
67 do not try to fix postscript code by filtering some instruc‐
68 tions.
69 -P, --removepreview
71 remove preview image (smaller file, but no preview anymore).
72 -F, --fixps
74 fix postscript code unconditionally. Otherwise, filtering is
75 usually triggered by detection of certain drivers only.
76 -c, --comments
78 preserve document structure comments.
79 -C, --clip
81 insert postscript code for clipping. Unless --nohires is speci‐
82 fied, the HiResBoundingBox (enlarged by 0.1 points) is used for
83 clipping.
84 -m, --mono
86 use black/white bitmap as base for calculation (default: off).
87 -s, --size=pagedim
89 where pagedim is a pre-defined standard page size (e.g.,
90 a4,a0,b0,letter,...) or explicitly specified in a format
91 pagedim:=XxY[cm|in], where X and Y are numbers (floating points
92 are accepted) followed by units centimeter (cm) or inch (in),
93 (default: cm). Use --size=list to list pre-defined pagesizes.
94 See also environment variable PS2EPS_SIZE.
95 -t, --translate=x,y
97 specify an x,y offset (may be negative) in postscript points
98 (1/72 dpi) for drawing. This option may be required if your
99 drawing has negative coordinates which usually lets ghostscript
100 cut the negative part of your picture, because it starts to ren‐
101 der at positive coordinates. The resulting output will also be
102 shifted.
103 -r, --resolution=dpi
105 specify a resolution in dpi (dots per inch) for drawing under
106 ghostscript. Default resolution is 144 dpi which is the double
107 of the typical 72 dpi. This option may help if there is a hard‐
108 ware dependent resolution encoded in the postscript, e.g.,
109 600dpi. Example: ps2eps -l -r 600 test.ps
110 -R, --rotate=direction
112 This option rotates the resulting EPS output. The parameter
113 direction determines the direction of rotation: + means +90
114 degrees (clockwise),- means -90 degrees (counter-clockwise), and
115 ^ means 180 degrees (up-side down).
116 -l, --loose
118 expand the original tight bounding box by one point in each
119 direction.
120 -B, --ignoreBB
122 do not use existing bounding box as page size for rendering.
123 -E, --ignoreEOF
125 do not use %%EOF as hint for end of file. Otherwise, ps2eps
126 assumes that postscript code ends after the last %%EOF comment,
127 because some drivers add trailing binary ``garbage'' code which
128 gets deleted by ps2eps by default.
129 -g, --gsbbox
131 use internal bbox device of ghostscript instead of the external
132 C program bbox. The internal bbox device of ghostscript gener‐
133 ates different values (sometimes even incorrect), so using the
134 provided bbox should be more robust. See also environment vari‐
135 able PS2EPS_GSBBOX.
136 -H, --nohires
138 do not generate a %%HiResBoundingBox comment for output.
139 -a, --accuracy
141 increase the accuracy by turning subsample antialiasing on (may
142 be slower)
143 -L, --license
145 show licensing information.
146 -d, --debuggs
148 show ghostscript call. This may be helpful for solving problems
149 that occur during a ghostscript call.
150 -W, --warnings
152 show warnings about sanity of generated EPS file. Certain post‐
153 script commands should not be contained in an EPS file. With
154 this option set ps2eps will issue a warning if it detects at
155 least one of them.
156
158 Based on the given postscript source code (in most cases generated by
159 some postscript printer driver) there are many potential obstacles or
160 problems that may occur when trying to create proper EPS files. Please
161 read this section carefully to be aware of common pitfalls.
162 INCOMPLETE/CLIPPED IMAGES
164 or how to determine the right size for ghostscript.
165 If you have documents that are larger than your ghostscript default
167 (usually A4 or US letter), you have to specify the page dimensions
168 explicitly using the -s option. Otherwise your EPS might be cut off
169 during rasterizing by ghostscript resulting in a wrongly calculated
170 bounding box. You can pass all pre-defined page sizes to -s that ghost‐
171 script understands. These are currently: 11x17, ledger, legal, letter,
172 lettersmall, archA, archB, archC, archD, archE a0, a1, a2, a3, a4, a5,
173 a6, a7, a8, a9, a10, isob0, isob1, isob2, isob3, isob4, isob5, isob6,
174 b0, b1, b2, b3, b4, b5, c0, c1, c2, c3, c4, c5, c6, jisb0, jisb1,
175 jisb2, jisb3, jisb4, jisb5, jisb6, flsa, flse, halfletter. Unfortu‐
176 nately, all sizes are currently only available in portrait orientation
177 (not landscape).
178 By default, ps2eps uses an already given %%BoundingBox from the source
180 file, which often corresponds to the size of the physical page format
181 for which the document was printed. However, you should be aware that
182 this already specified bounding box may be not correct, thus resulting
183 in a wrongly cropped (or even no usable) .eps-file. ps2eps can only do
184 as good as ghostscript does in rendering the original postscript file
185 (though ps2eps even works with negative and fractional values are con‐
186 tained in the original bounding box by using automatic translation).
187 Therefore, if the given bounding box is to small or incorrect anyway,
188 you can ignore the existing bounding box with the -B option, which will
189 cause ghostscript to use its internal default size (or use -s). How‐
190 ever, if the BoundingBox has negative coordinates, which is not allowed
191 by the specification, ps2eps will shift the output to positive values.
192 Hint: to avoid rotating the picture if you have the original drawing in
194 landscape format, you may use the ``Encapsulated Postscript'' option in
195 the printer driver which should generate an EPS file (but with a bound‐
196 ing box of the sheet size!). But some Windows printer drivers are draw‐
197 ing the image with an offset from the bottom of the portrait page, so
198 that a part of it is drawn outside the landscape oriented page. In
199 this case, you'll have to specify a square size of the page using the
200 maximum length, e.g., 29.7cm x 29.7cm for an A4 page.
201 CLIPPING
203 or why gets some of my text deleted above the included .eps file?
204 Some postscript drivers draw a white rectangle from the top left corner
206 of the page to the right lower corner of the object. This may erase
207 some or even all text above your imported/included EPS file, which is
208 very annoying. In order to prevent this, most programs have a clipping
209 option for imported .eps files (within LaTeX you can use \includegraph‐
210 ics*{}) for this purpose. If this is unfortunately not the case, you
211 can use the -C option of ps2eps which will (hopefully) do it for you.
212 Unfortunately, PScript.dll 5.2 (Windows XP) introduced new very badly
213 behaving Postscript code (initclip) which will even override the outer
214 clipping! Thus, a new filter had to be installed in ps2eps which will
215 fix it.
216 However, because most programs clip directly on the bounding box, you
218 still may loose some pixels of your image, because the bounding box is
219 described in the coarse resolution of postscript points, i.e. 72 dpi.
220 In order to prevent this, you can use the -l option or -C option (for
221 the latter, clipping by the importing program should be disabled then)
222 to allow for a 1 point larger bounding box. -C clips around a 1 point
223 enlarged bounding box and -l enlarges the bounding box values by 1
224 point (you can also combine both options).
225 INCLUDED FILTERS
227 Some postscript sequences, e.g., for using specific printer features
228 (featurebegin ...), are not working well within an .eps file, so ps2eps
229 tries to filter them out. But please note that filters for postscript
230 code may not work properly for your printer driver (ps2eps was mainly
231 tested with HP and Adobe printer drivers, although it may work for all
232 printers using the PScript.dll). In this case you can try to turn of
233 filtering by using option -n, or try to find the bad sequence in the
234 postscript code and adapt the filter rule in the ps2eps script (vari‐
235 ables $linefilter, $rangefilter_begin, $rangefilter_end; linefilter is
236 an expression for filtering single lines, rangefilter_... are expres‐
237 sions that filter all lines between a pattern matching $range‐
238 filter_begin and $rangefilter_end; drop me an e-mail with your modifi‐
239 cations). However, things may change as the printer drivers (e.g.,
240 PScript.dll) or postscript language evolve.
241 Some applications or drivers generate postscript code with leading or
243 trailing binary code, which often confuses older postscript inter‐
244 preters. ps2eps tries to remove such code, but it may sometimes make a
245 wrong guess about start and end of the real postscript code (drop me an
246 e-mail with a zipped postscript source, see section BUGS).
247 Comment lines or even blank lines are removed (which is the default to
249 make .eps files smaller), which may corrupt your output. Please check
250 the next section how to fix this. ps2eps removes blank lines and also
251 <CR> (carriage ceturn ``\r'') at the end of lines. However, nicely for‐
252 matted postscript code gives a hint by using ``%%BeginBinary'' ``%%End‐
253 Binary'' comments. When ps2eps detects these comments it will refrain
254 from any filtering action within the marked binary sections.
255 ps2eps filters also %%Orientation: comments by default (you can use
257 option -O to turn off filtering), because ghostscript may ``automagi‐
258 cally'' rotate images when generating PDF images, which is not desired
259 in most cases. Hint: you can turn off that feature in ghostscript
260 unconditionally by specifying -dAutoRotatePages=/None.
261 CORRUPTED OUTPUT
263 Some postscript code may get corrupted when comment lines or even blank
264 lines are removed (which is the default to make .eps files smaller),
265 because those files may contain encoded images which also have a % as
266 first character in a line or use a special comment as end of image
267 delimiter. If this is the case, use the -c option to prevent filtering
268 comments.
269 COLOR AND MEMORY
271 ps2eps supports colored postscript, consequently letting ghostscript
272 consume more resources for drawing its bitmap (roughly 6MBytes for an
273 A4 page). bbox is reading the bitmap line by line so it consumes only
274 minimal memory. If you experience problems with memory consumption of
275 ghostscript, you may use the -m option for using a monochrome image.
276 But this will probably result in wrongly determined bounding boxes with
277 colored images, because ghostscript has to do black/white dithering and
278 may thus suppress objects drawn in light colors.
279 Another option in case of memory problems and too long run times is to
281 use the much more memory efficient internal ghostscript bbox by using
282 the -g option.
283
285 Please note that a command line option always takes precedence over the
286 related environment variable.
287 The environment variable PS2EPS_SIZE can be used to specify a default
289 page size and take any argument that --size accepts. Examples: export
290 PS2EPS_SIZE=a0 (bash-like syntax) or setenv PS2EPS_SIZE letter (csh
291 syntax).
292 If the environment variable PS2EPS_GSBBOX is set the internal bbox
294 device of ghostscript will be used instead of the external command
295 bbox. Examples: export PS2EPS_GSBBOX=true (bash-like syntax) or setenv
296 PS2EPS_GSBBOX 1 (csh syntax).
297
299 The usual call is simply: ps2eps -l file
300 A relatively failsafe call would be (if your postscript is smaller than
302 iso b0 [100cm x 141.4cm] and you have a fast computer with enough mem‐
303 ory): ps2eps -l -B -s b0 -c -n file
304 If output is not correct try: ps2eps -l -B -s b0 -F file
306
308 ps2eps was written by Roland Bless.
309 WHY?
311 Other programs like ps2epsi do not calculate the bounding box always
312 correctly (because the values are put on the postscript stack which may
313 get corrupted by bad postscript code) or rounded it off so that clip‐
314 ping the EPS cut off some part of the image. ps2eps uses a double pre‐
315 cision resolution of 144 dpi and appropriate rounding to get a proper
316 bounding box. The internal bbox device of ghostscript generates differ‐
317 ent values (sometimes even incorrect), so using the provided bbox
318 should be more robust. However, because normal clipping has only a
319 resolution of 1/72dpi (postscript point), the clipping process may
320 still erase parts of your EPS image. In this case please use the -l
321 option to add an additional point of white space around the tight
322 bounding box.
323 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
325 Some people contributed code or suggestions to improve ps2eps. Here are
326 at least some names (sorry if I forgot your name): Christophe Druet,
327 Hans Ecke, Berend Hasselman, Erik Joergensen, Koji Nakamaru, Hans
328 Fredrik Nordhaug, Michael Sharpe. Special thanks goes to Michael
329 Sharpe from UCSD who suggested a lot of useful features for ps2eps and
330 who fixed bbox to become more precise and robust.
331 An earlier version of this manual page was originally written by Rafael
333 Laboissiere <rafael at debian.org> for the Debian system. Thank you
334 Rafael!
335 Permission is granted to copy, distribute and/or modify this document
337 under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation License, Version 1.1 or
338 any later version published by the Free Software Foundation; with no
339 Invariant Sections, no Front-Cover Texts and no Back-Cover Texts.
340
342 If you experience problems, please check carefully all hints in the
343 section TROUBLESHOOTING first. Otherwise, check for an updated version
344 at <URL:http://www.tm.uka.de/~bless/ps2eps> or send a gzipped file of
345 relevant postscript source code with your error description and ps2eps
346 version number to <roland at bless.de> (please allow some time to
347 reply).
348
350 bbox (1), gs (1), ps2epsi (1)
351 31 August 2010 PS2EPS(1)