[vox-tech] another PS2PDF question [solved]

[Jonathan Stickel]

Dylan Beaudette wrote:
> 
> Well, after a little bit of googling, it looks like there was a rather simple 
> solution. Since ps2pdf14 and epstopdf were just sending some pre-defined 
> parameters to ghost script, it is possible to setup the gs environment, and 
> then call epstopdf:
> 
> export GS_OPTIONS=-dPDFSETTINGS=/prepress
> epstopdf --nocompress file.eps
> 
> This will produce a PDF of the correct page size, without JPEG compression on 
> embedded images!


I don't know if your images are color or not, but your solution is not 
sufficient when dealing with embedded color images (at least for me). 
I've found that I need to edit the "epstopdf" script.  The two lines 
that deal with "GSOPTS" need to be changed to:

my $GSOPTS = "-dAutoFilterColorImages=false 
-dColorImageFilter=/FlateEncode ";
$GSOPTS = "-dEncodeColorImages=false " unless $::opt_compress;

In fact, it is OK to compress the images as long as Flate encoding is 
used rather that JPEG.  The above edit does this.


> 
> Just for the record, this allows one to create a poster in something like 
> Inkscape (http://www.inkscape.org/), an opensource page layout program, and 
> then save the file as an EPS. Unfortunately this EPS file is not easily sent 
> to a printer (tried opening it in Illustrator 10, and there were numerous 
> propblems in terms of printable area, etc.), thus the above method will 
> create a JPEG compression-less PDF which can easily be printed from a PDF 
> viewer. 
> 

How does inkscape compare to xfig?

Jonathan