From within gsview pstoedit can be called via
"Edit | Convert to vector format"
For this pstoedit needs to be installed in parallel to gsview. This means that if gsview is installed under "c:\program files\ghostgum\gsview\gsview32.exe"
then pstoedit is expected in "c:\program files\ghostgum\pstoedit\pstoedit.dll"
FROM PROGRAMS THAT SUPPORT THE ALDUS GRAPHIC IMPORT FILTER INTERFACE
pstoedit
can also be used as PostScript and PDF graphic import filter for several programs including
MS-Office 95/97,2000,XP PaintShop-Pro and PhotoLine. See
http://www.pstoedit.net/importps/
for more
details.
DESCRIPTION
RELEASE LEVEL
This manpage documents release 3.33 of pstoedit.
USE
pstoedit
converts PostScript and PDF files to various vector graphic
formats. The resulting files can be edited or imported into various drawing
packages. Type
pstoedit -help
to get a list of supported output formats. Pstoedit comes with a
large set of format drivers integrated in the binary. Additional drivers can be
installed as plugins and are available via
http://www.pstoedit.net/plugins/.
Just
copy the plugins to the same directory where the pstoedit binary is installed.
However, unless you also get a license key for the plugins, the additional
drivers will slightly distort the resulting graphics. See the documentation
provided with the plugins for further details.
PRINCIPLE OF CONVERSION
pstoedit
works by redefining the two basic painting operators of
PostScript, stroke
and show
(bitmaps drawn by the image
operator are not supported by all backends.) After
redefining these operators, the PostScript or PDF file that needs to be
converted is processed by a PostScript interpreter, e.g., Ghostscript
(gs(1)).
You normally need to have a PostScript interpreter installed in
order to use this program. However, you can perform some "back end" processing
of prepared files by specifying the -bo
option for debugging or limited
filtering. See "BACK END-SPECIFIC OPTIONS" below.
The output that is written by the interpreter due to the redefinition of the
drawing operators is a sort of 'flat' PostScript file that contains only simple
operations like moveto, lineto, show, etc. You can look at this file using the
-f debug
option.
This output is read by end-processing functions of pstoedit
and triggers
the drawing functions in the selected back end driver, or backend.
NOTES
If you want to process PDF files directly, your PostScript interpreter must
provide this feature, as does Ghostscript. Aladdin Ghostscript 4.03 or later is
recommended for processing PDF (and PostScript Level 2) files.
OPTIONS
-correctdefinefont
Some PostScript files, e.g. such as generated by ChemDraw, use the PostScript definefont operator in way that is incompatible with pstoedit's assumptions. The new font is defined by copying an old font without changing the FontName of the new font. When this option is applied, some "patches" are done after a definefont in order to make it again compatible with pstoedit's assumptions. This option is not enabled per default, since it may break other PostScript file. It is tested only with ChemDraw generated files.
-dt
Draw text - Text is drawn as polygons. This might produce a large output file. This option is automatically
switched on if the selected backend does not support this, e.g.
gnuplot(1).
-adt
Automatic Draw text - This option turns on the -dt option selectively for fonts that seem to be no normal text fonts, e.g. Symbol..
-ndt
Never Draw text - fully disable the heuristics used by pstoedit to decide when to "draw" text instead of showing it as text. This may produce incorrect results, but in some cases it might nevertheless be useful. "Use at own risk".
-t2fontsast1
Handle type 2 fonts same as type 1. Type 2 fonts sometimes occur as
embedded fonts within PDF files. In the default mode, text using such fonts is drawn as polygons
since pstoedit assumes that such a font is not available on the users machine. If this option
is set, pstoedit assumes that the internal encoding follows the same as for a standard font
and generates normal text output. This assumption may not be true in all cases. But it
is nearly impossible for pstoedit to verify this assumption - it would have to do a sort of OCR.
-ndt
fully disable any heuristic about drawing text. However, this can result in
unsupported fontnames to be generated into the output file so there is no guarentee about the
correctness of the generated output in this case.
-pti or -pta
Precision text - With -pta,
each character of a text string is placed
separately. With -pti,
this is done only in cases when there is a non zero inter-letter
spacing. Normally
a text string is drawn as it occurs in the input file. However, in some situations, this might
produce wrongly positioned characters. This is due to limitiations in most backends of
pstoedit. They cannot represent text with arbitray inter-letter spacing which is easily
possible in PDF and PostScript. The downside of "precision text" is a bigger file size and hard to edit
text.
-nfr
In normal mode pstoedit replaces bitmap fonts with a font as defined by the -df
option. This is done, because most backends can't handle such fonts. This behavior can be
switched off using the -nfr
option but then it strongly depends on the application reading the the generated file whether the file is usable and correctly interpreted or not. Any problems are then out of control of pstoedit.
-dis
Open a display during processing by Ghostscript. Some files
only work correctly this way.
-psarg string
The string given with this option is passed
directly to Ghostscript when Ghostscript is called to process the
PostScript file for pstoedit.
For example:
-psarg "-r300x300"
This causes the resolution to be changed to
300x300 dpi. (With older versions of GhostScript, changing the resolution
this way has an effect only if -display
is set.)
You can switch Ghostscript into PostScript Level 1 only mode by
-psarg "level1.ps".
This can be useful for example if the PostScript file to be
converted uses some Level 2 specific custom color models that are not supported
by pstoedit. However, this requires that the PostScript program checks for the
PostScript level supported by the interpreter and "acts" accordingly.
If you want to pass multiple options to Ghostscript you must can use multiple
-psarg options -psarg opt1-psarg opt2-psarg opt2.
See the GhostScript manual for other possible options.
-merge
Some output formats permit the representation of filled
polygons with edges that are in a different color than the fill color.
Since PostScript does not support this, drawing programs typically
generate two objects (the outline and the filled polygon) into the
PostScript output. pstoedit
is able to recombine these, if they
follow each other directly and you specify -merge.
-page page number
Select a single page from a multi page
PostScript or PDF file.
-rotate angle (0-360)
Rotage image by angle.
-rgb
Since version 3.30 pstoedit uses the CMYK colors internally. The -rgb option turns on the old behavior to use RGB values.
-split
Create a new file for each page of the input. For this the
output filename must contain a %d which is replaced with the current page
number. This option is automatically switched on for backends that don't
support multiple pages within one file, e.g. fig or gnuplot.
-uchar character
Sometimes pstoedit cannot map a character
from the encoding used by the PostScript file to the font encoding of the target
format. In this case pstoedit replaces the input character by a special character
in order to show all the places that couldn't be mapped correctly. The default
for this is a "#". Using the -uchar
option it is possible to specify another character
to be used instead. If you want to use a space, use -uchar " ".
-df fontname
Sometimes fonts embedded in a PostScript
programs do not have a fontname. For example, this happens in PostScript
files generated by dvips(1).
In such a case pstoedit
uses a
replacement font. The default for this is Courier. Another font can be
specified using the -df
option. -df Helvetica
causes all
unnamed fonts to be replaced by Helvetica.
-include name of a PostScript file to be included
This
options allows to specify an additional PostScript file that will be
executed just before the normal input is read. This is helpful for
including specific page settings or for disabling potentially unsafe
PostScript operators, e.g., file, renamefile, or deletefile.
-fontmap name of font map file for pstoedit
The font map is a
simple text file containing lines in the following format:
document_font_name target_font_name
% lines beginning with % are comments
% if a font name contains spaces, use
% the "font name with spaces" notation.
Each font name found in the document is checked agains this mapping and if
there is a corresponding entry, the new name is used for the output.
If the -fontmap
option is not specified, pstoedit
automatically looks for the file drivername.fmp
in the installation
directory and uses that file as a default fontmap file if available. The
installation directory is:
*
Windows: The same directory where the pstoedit executable is
located
*
Unix:
<
The directory where the pstoedit executably is located
>/../lib/
The mpost.fmp in the misc directory of the pstoedit distibution is a sample
map file with mappings from over 5000 PostScript font names to their TeX
equivalents. This is useful because MetaPost is frequently used with
TeX/LaTeX and those programs don't use standard font names. This file and
the MetaPost backend are provided by Scott Pakin
(pakin@cs.uiuc.edu).
Another example is wemf.fmp to be used under Windows. See the misc
directory of the pstoedit distribution.
-f format
target output format recognized by
pstoedit.
Since other format drivers can be loaded dynamically,
type pstoedit -help
to get a full list of formats. See "BACK
END-SPECIFIC OPTIONS" below for an explanation of the [:options]
to
-f
format.
-scale factor
scale by the specified factor. (Currently used with
-f tgif
backend only.)
-ssp
simulate sub paths
Several backend don't support PostScript pathes containing sub pathes, i.e.
pathes with intermediate movetos. In the normal case, each subpath is
treated as an independent path for such backends. This can lead to bad
looking results. The most common case where this happens is if you use the
-dt
option and show some text with letters like e, o, or b, i.e.
letter that have a "hole". When the -ssp
option is set, pstoedit
tries to eliminate these problems. However, this option is CPU time
intensive!
-sclip
simulate clipping
Most backends of pstoedit don't have native support for clipping. For that
pstoedit
offers an option to perform the clipping of the graphics
directly without passing the clippath to the backends. However, this
results in curves being replaces by a lot of line segments and thus larger
output files. So use this option only if your output looks different from
the input due to clipping. In addition, this "simulated clipping" is not
exactly the same as defined in PostScript. There might be lines drawn at
the double size. Also clipping of text is not supported unless you also use
the -dt
option.
-pagesizestring
set page size for output medium
This option sets the page size for the output medium. Currently this
is just used by the libplot backend, but might be used by other
backends in future. The page size is specified in terms of the usual
page size names, e.g. letter or a4.
-bo
You can run backend processing only (without the PostScript
interpreter frontend) by first running pstoedit-f dumpinfiledumpfile
and then running pstoedit-f format-bodumpfileoutfile.
-flat number
If the backend does not support curves in the way
PostScript does or if the -nc
option is specified, all curves are
approximated by lines. Using the -flat
option one can control this
approximation. This parameter is directly converted to a PostScript
setflat
command. Higher numbers, e.g. 10 give rougher, lower
numbers, e.g. 0.1 finer approximations.
-nb
Since version 3.10 pstoedit
uses the
-dDELAYBIND
option when calling GhostScript. Previously the
-dNOBIND
option was used instead but that sometimes caused
problems if a user's PostScript file overloaded standard PostScript
operator with totally new semantic, e.g. lt for lineto. Using -nb
the
old style can be activated again in case the -dDELAYBIND
gives
different results as before. In such a case please also contact the
author.
-nc
no curves
Normally pstoedit tries to keep curves from the input and transfers them to
the output if the output format supports curves. If the backend does not
support curves, then pstoedit replaces curves by a series of lines (see
also -flat
option). However, in some cases the user might wish to
have this behavior also for backends that originally support curves. This
can be forced via the -nc
option.
-nq
No exit from the PostScript interpreter. Normally Ghostscript
exits after processing the pstoedit input-file. For debugging it can be
useful to avoid this. If you do, you will have to type quit at the
GS> prompt to exit from Ghostscript.
-v
Switch on verbose mode. Some additional information is shown
during processing.
-nomaptoisolatin1
Normally pstoedit
maps all character
codes to the ones defined by the ISO-Latin1 encoding. If you specify
-nomaptoisolatin1
then the encoding from the input PostScript is
passed unchanged to the output.
input-file
input file. If a "-" is given, standard input is used.
output-file
output file. If no output file or "-" is given as argument,
pstoedit
writes the result to standard output.
If neither an input nor an output file is given as argument, pstoedit works as filter reading from standard input and
writing to standard output.
BACK END-SPECIFIC OPTIONS
pstoedit
allows you to pass individual options to a backend. This is done by
appending all options to the format specified after the -f
option. The format
specifier and its options must be separated by a colon (:). If more than one
option needs to be passed to the backend, the whole argument to -f
must be
enclosed within double-quote characters, thus:
-f "format[:option option ...]"
To see which options are supported by a specific format, type:
pstoedit -f format:-help
The following description is it not up to date at the moment. Sorry! Please use the above command
to get a current list of options supported by the specific format.
Currently met,
java,
dxf,
pic,
fig,
metapost,
LaTeX2e,
mif,
emf,
and wmf
are the only drivers accepting specific options.
Other options may be asserted through environment variables. See "ENVIRONMENT
VARIABLES" below.
The wmf
and the emf
driver supports the following backend specific options:
-f wmf:m
Maps all fonts in the document to Arial (should be
available on every Windows installation)
-f wmf:n
Emulate narrow fonts by shrinking fonts horizontally
(sometimes does not look that good, but it's the only chance, when
requested font weight is not available. And this is quite common for
off-the-shelf Windows installations)
-f wmf:b
DON'T draw two white border pixel (upper left and lower
right corner). They are normally drawn to keep content always within
bounding box (is sometimes clipped otherwise, i.e. Windows doesn't
respect pen thickness or rotated text extents).
This could be done more smarter for EMF, have to figure out...
The java
backend allows to specify the class name of the class that is
generated by pstoedit. The default is PSJava. You can change this using
-f java:anothername
.PP
The dxf
backend accepts the option -lines
which forces all
polygons and lines to be represented as LINEs in the generated DXF file. The
default is to use POLYLINEs.
Example:
-f "dxf:-lines"
The met
backend allows the following single character options (without a
leading -)
p
Draw no geometric linewidths, all lines have a width of zero.
l
No filling of polygon interiors.
c
No colors, just greyscales.
t
Omit all text.
g
Omit all graphics.
v
Put verbose output to STDERR.
Example:
-f "met:lc"
The pic
backend accepts the options:
-troff
.TP
-groff which forces output to be compatible with troff and groff,
respectively. Groff mode is default, troff mode severely limiting
the choice of supported text fonts.
BUG: these options really does not belong in a backend
-keep
makes the pic backend emit the full font name of fonts that does
not map to built-in groff fonts.
-text
makes the pic backend attempt to recognize running text, and
treat it accordingly.
-landscape
.TP
-portrait to compensate for the postscript orientation. Portrait mode is
default.
Example:
-f "pic:-troff -text -landscape"
The fig
driver accepts the following options:
-startdepth
Fig knows about 999 layers (0 is the topmost, 999 the backmost). Per
default, pstoedit starts with layer 999 and then places all subsequent
objects on lower layers (on top of the previous objects). This can result
in problems if you want to put something "below" all the objects that
were created by pstoedit. In such a case you should define a lower number
to leave some space behind.
-depth
depth in inches. Sets the paper width to the specified size in inches.
The ps2ai
driver provides an option to select to old AI-88 format
instead of the default AI-3
-88
selects the AI-88 format.
Example: -f ps2ai:-88
The tgif
driver provides option to control the conversion of text
strings into hyperlink attributes.
-ta
enables the conversion of text into boxes with hyperlink attributes. More
options allowing finer control about this new feature will follow in
future versions.
The tk
driver supports the following backend specific options:
-f tk:I
Disables ImPress specific formatting. Only canvas
objects will be output.
-f tk:N tagname
Adds a specific tag to all objects. If ImPress
formatting is enabled, the items will be grouped.
-f tk:n tagname
Deprecated option. Behaves like N.
-f tk:R
If ImPress formatting is enabled, swap the Width and
Height associated with the pagesize.
The mif
backend allows the following options:
-f mif:-nopage
Generates an anchored frame instead of a full page.
This is useful, if you want to insert a figure into an existing document.
-f mif:-imagesaspng
Bitmap images are written as PNG files instead
of EPS. This is still experimental but should work for non rotated bitmaps.
The GNU libplot driver (gmfa,
gmfb,
plot)
provides a huge
set of options. All these are described in the header of the drvlplot.cpp file.
NOTES
autotrace:
pstoedit cooperates with autotrace. Autotrace can now produce a dump file
for further processing by pstoedit using the -bo
(backend only) option.
Autotrace is a program written by a group around Martin Weber and can be
found at http://sourceforge.net/projects/autotrace/.
Ps2ai:
The ps2ai backend is not a native pstoedit backend. It does not use the
pstoedit postcript flattener, instead it uses the PostScript program
ps2ai.ps which is installed in the GhostScript distribution directory. It
is included to provide the same "look-and-feel" for the conversion to AI.
The additional benefit is that this conversion is now available also via
the "convert-to-vector" menu of Gsview. However, lot's of files don't
convert nicely or at all using ps2ai.ps. So a native pstoedit driver would
be much better. Anyone out there to take this ? The AI format is usable for
example by Mayura Draw (http://www.mayura.com).
Also a driver to the
Mayura native format would be nice.
If you have a version of GhostScript older than 5.60, then
you have to apply the following simple patch to the
ps2ai.ps
file in order to make this driver work.
This patch is already included in newer versions of GhostScript.
After the line "/vers {2.13} def" insert:
/cdef { 1 index where { pop pop pop } { def } ifelse } def
Replace the lines:
"/jout false def"
with
"/jout false cdef"
(notice the cdef instead of def)
"/joutput (ps2ai.out.aips) def"
with
"/joutput (ps2ai.out.aips) cdef"
"/joutln false def"
with
"/joutln false cdef"
and the line
"/jtxt3 true def"
with
"/jtxt3 true cdef"
Note: If you already patched ps2ai
for pstoedit version 3.02. you
have to change to the patch above. This version is different but it better
fits the ideas of Peter L. Deutsch. Sorry for the confusion, but this way
chances are better that this version will go into the GhostScript
distribution.
MetaPost:
Note that, as far as Scott knows, MetaPost does not support PostScript's
eofill. My backend just converts eofill to fill, and issues a warning if
verbose is set. Fortunately, very few PostScript programs rely on the
even-odd fill rule, even though many specify it.
LaTeX2e's picture environment is not very powerful. As a result, many
elementary PostScript constructs are ignored -- fills, line
thicknesses (besides "thick" and "thin"), and dash patterns, to name a
few. Furthermore, complex pictures may overrun TeX's memory capacity.
*
Some PostScript constructs are not supported directly by "picture",
but can be handled by external packages. If a figure uses color, the
top-level document will need to do a "\usepackage{color}". And if a
figure contains rotated text, the top-level document will need to do a
"\usepackage{rotating}".
*
All lengths, coordinates, and font sizes output by the backend are in
terms of \unitlength, so scaling a figure is simply a matter of doing
a "\setlength{\unitlength}{...}".
*
The backend currently supports one backend-specific option,
"integers", which rounds all lengths, coordinates, and font sizes to
the nearest integer. This makes hand-editing the picture a little
nicer.
*
Why is this backend useful? One answer is portability; any LaTeX2e
system can handle the picture environment, even if it can't handle
PostScript graphics. (pdfLaTeX comes to mind here.) A second answer
is that pictures can be edited easily to contain any arbitrary LaTeX2e
code. For instance, the text in a figure can be modified to contain
complex mathematics, non-Latin alphabets, bibliographic citations, or
-- the real reason Scott wrote the LaTeX2e backend -- hyperlinks to the
surrounding document (with help from the hyperref package).
creating a new backend:
To implement a new backend you can start from drvsampl.cpp
and
drvsampl.h.
See also comments in drvbase.h
and
drvfuncs.h
for an explanation of methods that should be implemented
for a new backend.
ENVIRONMENT VARIABLES
A default PostScript interpreter to be called by pstoedit is specified at
compile time. You can overwrite the default by setting the GS environment
variable to the name of a suitable PostScript interpreter.
You can check which name of a PostScript interpreter was compiled into
pstoedit using: pstoedit-help -v.
See the GhostScript manual for descriptions of environment variables used by
Ghostscript most importantly GS_FONTPATH and GS_LIB; other
environment variables also affect output to display, print, and additional
filtering and processing. See the related documentation.
pstoedit
allocates temporary files using the function tempnam(3).
Thus the location for temporary files might be controllable by other
environment variables used by this function. See the tempnam(3)
manpage
for descriptions of environment variables used. On UNIX like system this is
probably the TMPDIR variable, on DOS/WINDOWS either TMP or
TEMP.
SYSTEM SPECIFIC NOTES
DOS/WINDOWS
pstoedit compiled with MS-Visual C++ or Borland C++ runs under 32-bit
only. It might run under WIN32s, but certainly does not run under plain
16-bit DOS.
pstoedit
works best if you installed at least version 5.50 of
GhostScript and version 2.72 of gsview. Using older version of
GhostScript is possible but requires the setting of some environment
variables.
TROUBLE SHOOTING
If you have problems with pstoedit
first try whether Ghostscript
successfully displays your file. If yes try
pstoedit-f psinfile.pstestfile.ps
and check whether testfile.ps
still displays correctly using
Ghostscript. If this file doesn't look correctly then there seems to be a
problem with pstoedit's
PostScript frontend. If this file looks good
but the output for a specific format is wrong, the problem is probably in
the backend for the specific format. In either case send bug fixes and
reports to the author.
A common problem with PostScript files is that the PostScript file redefines
one of the standard PostScript operators inconsistently. There is no effect
of this if you just print the file since the original PostScript "program"
uses these new operator in the new meaning and does not use the original
ones anymoew. However, when run under the control of pstoedit, these
operators are expected to work with the original semantics.
So far I've seen redefinitions for:
*
lt - "less-then" to mean "draw a line to"
*
string - "create a string object" to mean "draw a string"
*
length - "get the length of e.g. a string" to a "float constant"
I've included work-arounds for the ones mentioned above, but some others
could show up in addition to those.
RESTRICTIONS
Non-standard fonts (e.g. TeXbitmap fonts) are mapped to a default font which
can be changed using the -df
option. pstoedit
chooses the size of
the replacement font such that the width of the string in the original font is
the same as in the replacement font. This is done for each text fragment
displayed. Special character encoding support is limited in this case. If a
character cannot be mapped into the target format, pstoedit displays a '#'
instead. See also the -uchar option.
pstoedit supports bitmap graphics only for some backends.
The Gnuplot backend and the 3D backends (rpl, lwo, rib) do not support text.
Generally, pstoedit does not support clipping. You can try to use the
-sclip
option to simulate clipping. However, this doesn't work in all cases
as expected.
Special note about the Java backends (java1 and java2)
The java backends generate a java source file that needs other files in
order to be compiled and usable. These other files are Java classes (one
applet and support classes) that allow to step through the individual pages
of a converted PostScript document. This applet can easily be activated from
a html-document. See the java/java1/readme_java1.txt
or
java/java2/readme_java2.htm
file for more details.
FAQS
Why do letters like O or B get strange if converted to tgif/xfig
using the -dt
option?
This is because most backends don't support composite paths with
intermediate gaps (moveto's) and second don't support very well the (eo)fill
operators of PostScript (winding rule). For such objects pstoedit
breaks
them into smaller objects whenever such a gap is found. This results in the
"hole" beeing filled with black color instead of beeing transparent. Since
version 3.11 you can try the -ssp
option in combination with the xfig
backend.
Why does pstoedit produce ugly results from PostScript files generated
by dvips?
TeX documents usually use bitmap fonts. Such fonts cannot be used as native
font in other format. So pstoedit replaces the TeX font with another native
font. Of course, the replacement font will in most cases produce another
look, especially if mathematical symbols are used.
At this site you also find more information about pstoedit
and related
programs and hints how to subscribe to a mailing list in order to get informed
about new releases and bug-fixes.
Rolf Niepraschk (niepraschk@ptb.de) converted the HTML man page
to LaTeX. This allows to generate the UNIX style and the HTML manual from this
base format.
*
Several others sent smaller bug fixed and bug reports. Sorry if I don't
mention them all here.
Robert S. Maier (rsm@math.arizona.edu) for many improvements on
the libplot backend and for libplot itself.
*
The authors of pstotext (mcjones@pa.dec.com and birrell@pa.dec.com)
for giving me the permission to use their simple PostScript code for
performing rotation.
*
Daniel Gehriger gehriger@linkcad.com for his help concerning the handling of Splines in the DXF format.
*
Allen Barnett libemf@lignumcomputing.com for his work on the libEMF which allows to create WMF/EMF files under *nix systems.
*
Dave dave@opaque.net for providing the libming which is a multiplatform library for generating SWF files.
*
Masatake Yamoto for the introduction of autoconf, automake and libtool into pstoedit
*
Bob Friesenhahn for his help and the building of the Magick++ API to ImageMagick.
Trademarks mentioned are the property of their respective owners.
Some code incorporated in the pstoedit package is subject to copyright or
other intellectual property rights or restrictions including attribution
rights. See the notes in individual files.
pstoedit
is controlled under the Free Software Foundation GNU Public
License (GPL). However, this does not apply to importps and the additional
plugins.
Aladdin Ghostscript is a redistributable software package with copyright
restrictions controlled by Aladdin Software.
pstoedit
has no other relation to Ghostscript besides calling it in a
subprocess.
The authors, contributors, and distributors of pstoedit are not responsible
for its use for any purpose, or for the results generated thereby.
Restrictions such as the foregoing may apply in other countries according to
international conventions and agreements.
