Re: Alternative to SVG
Why not convert eps to gif/jpg and then embed gifs/jpgs into the document? Bill Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 10/30/2001 09:35:50 AM Please respond to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Subject: Alternative to SVG We're evaluating FOP as an alternative to our current XML publishing softtware, and have discovered that the biggest obstacle is our large set of legacy .eps graphics. Apparently, FOP only supposrts SVG for vector graphics. We can batch convert our .eps files into .pdf, which leads me to the following question: Is there a way to embed a .pdf file within the fo file, and have FOP process this correctly in the final resultant .pdf file? Thanks in advance, Bill Lawrence __ANSYS, Inc. - Dominating Engineering Simulation___ Bill Lawrence Senior Tools Specialist 275 Technology Drive Canonsburg, PA 15317 Ph: 724.514.2973 _ - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Alternative to SVG
There are several reasons for not converting the .eps graphics to a bitmapped format: 1) These illustrations (and we have literally thousands of them) are technical illustrations that require very clear printed output. Most conversion software that I'm familiar with simply grabs the tiff preview embedded in the .eps file and converts that to .gif or .jpg. This is sufficient for web use, but not for printing. 2) Given that we have thousands of these drawings, I fear that they would cause the size of the .pdf files to grow to be very large. We intend to ship .pdf files on CD to our customers. We're talking about a set of books that comprises around 10,000 pages. Regards, Bill -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2001 9:40 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Alternative to SVG Why not convert eps to gif/jpg and then embed gifs/jpgs into the document? Bill Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 10/30/2001 09:35:50 AM Please respond to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Subject: Alternative to SVG We're evaluating FOP as an alternative to our current XML publishing softtware, and have discovered that the biggest obstacle is our large set of legacy .eps graphics. Apparently, FOP only supposrts SVG for vector graphics. We can batch convert our .eps files into .pdf, which leads me to the following question: Is there a way to embed a .pdf file within the fo file, and have FOP process this correctly in the final resultant .pdf file? Thanks in advance, Bill Lawrence __ANSYS, Inc. - Dominating Engineering Simulation___ Bill Lawrence Senior Tools Specialist 275 Technology Drive Canonsburg, PA 15317 Ph: 724.514.2973 _ - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Alternative to SVG
If I were you, I think I would investigate conversion to svg further. pstoedit (www.pstoedit.net) has a shareware plugin for convertion .eps to svg, but I don't know how good it is. There might exist other packages that do the same (let me know if you find any!). Also the newest Adobe Illustrator (8.0 or 9.0) can save as svg, but there might be restrictions on what .eps format it supports (like you said, just using the preview picture). I don't think it's possible to embed pdf directly into another pdf document. It *might* be possible to support eps directly with fop by using pdf xobjects (not quite sure here, but I think I remember somthing about that from the pdf spec), but then the pdf document would have to be printed on a postscript printer to show the figures. Tore -Original Message- From: Bill Lawrence [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2001 15:52 To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' Subject: RE: Alternative to SVG There are several reasons for not converting the .eps graphics to a bitmapped format: 1) These illustrations (and we have literally thousands of them) are technical illustrations that require very clear printed output. Most conversion software that I'm familiar with simply grabs the tiff preview embedded in the .eps file and converts that to .gif or .jpg. This is sufficient for web use, but not for printing. 2) Given that we have thousands of these drawings, I fear that they would cause the size of the .pdf files to grow to be very large. We intend to ship .pdf files on CD to our customers. We're talking about a set of books that comprises around 10,000 pages. Regards, Bill -Original Message- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2001 9:40 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: Re: Alternative to SVG Why not convert eps to gif/jpg and then embed gifs/jpgs into the document? Bill Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED] on 10/30/2001 09:35:50 AM Please respond to [EMAIL PROTECTED] To: '[EMAIL PROTECTED]' [EMAIL PROTECTED] cc: Subject: Alternative to SVG We're evaluating FOP as an alternative to our current XML publishing softtware, and have discovered that the biggest obstacle is our large set of legacy .eps graphics. Apparently, FOP only supposrts SVG for vector graphics. We can batch convert our .eps files into .pdf, which leads me to the following question: Is there a way to embed a .pdf file within the fo file, and have FOP process this correctly in the final resultant .pdf file? Thanks in advance, Bill Lawrence __ANSYS, Inc. - Dominating Engineering Simulation___ Bill Lawrence Senior Tools Specialist 275 Technology Drive Canonsburg, PA 15317 Ph: 724.514.2973 _ - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Alternative to SVG
Thanks to all for the advice, but I'm afraid I've already gone down those paths. We could indeed translate our .eps graphics into .svg, and have in fact considerred this. One can use either Mayura or Illustrator for that purpose. However, it is an extremely long task given the number of graphics we have. It also requires that we have in place 1) An XML editor that can validate large DocBook documents which use many levels of file entities, and also can display SVG graphics. 2) An SVG to gif or jpg convertor that works reliably in batch mode. Batik might fit those requirements. The simplest approach would be to find an FO processor that can handle .eps. I'm somewhat surprised that this isn't built into FOP, given that it is designed to convert FO to PDF. Wouldn't it be logical for such a tool to therefore support PostScript graphics? Regards, Bill Lawrence -Original Message- From: Alex McLintock [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2001 11:18 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Subject: RE: Alternative to SVG --- Bill Lawrence [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: There are several reasons for not converting the .eps graphics to a bitmapped format: Yes - I agree, we had a bitmap logo which looks fine when being previewed on screen, but using an SVG vector graphic was much clearer when printed out. I didn't spot whether you had looked into using Adobe Illustrator 9 to load the EPS files and then save them as SVG. It may not do so perfectly but it is worth looking into. I don't know whether it can be automated though if you really do have thousands of illustrations You *might* need to do a little bit of tweeking of the SVG to get it to use the right namespaces and such like but I am sure that you could automate that... The following URL may help you find other converters... http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/SVG-Implementations.htm8#convert Goodluck PS My FOP FAQ seems to be down. That'll teach me to put stuff on a box without production level support. Sorry folks. Feel free to shout at me by email. It looks like I've volunteered myself to improve Apache's Official FAQ system so maybe we'll move this off of my machine onto an official Apache one. Alex = Alex McLintock[EMAIL PROTECTED]Open Source Consultancy in London OpenWeb Analysts Ltd, http://www.OWAL.co.uk/ --- SF and Computing Book News and Reviews: http://news.diversebooks.com/ Get Your XML T-Shirt t-shirt/ at http://www.inversity.co.uk/ COMPETITION : http://news.diversebooks.com/article.pl?sid=01/10/08/1947255 Nokia Game is on again. Go to http://uk.yahoo.com/nokiagame/ and join the new all media adventure before November 3rd. - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
RE: Alternative to SVG
Phil, I did try pstoedit, and it didn't work on a good percentage of our graphics (most in fact). Thanks, Bill -Original Message- From: Phil Endecott [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]] Sent: Tuesday, October 30, 2001 10:37 AM To: [EMAIL PROTECTED] Cc: Bill Lawrence Subject: Re: Alternative to SVG Hi Bill, Have you seen pstoedit? (http://www.pstoedit.net/). This will convert postscript to a variety of vector graphics formats, and it DOESN'T convert it to a bitmap first, so you should keep the original quality. The free version doesn't support SVG output; you can get a demo with SVG support, but it converts e to $ and messes up the colours. Real SVG support costs $50. It seems to be available for Windows, Linux and Solaris. My experience is only limited, but it does seem to work for the things that I've thrown at it. I haven't entirely worked out how to get the bounding box right yet. Good luck, --Phil. - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED] - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Alternative to SVG
I don't think it's possible to embed pdf directly into another pdf document. It *might* be possible to support eps directly with fop by using pdf xobjects (not quite sure here, but I think I remember somthing about that from the pdf spec), but then the pdf document would have to be printed on a postscript printer to show the figures. It's *possible* (pdftex and dvipdfm can do it), but nobody's written the code to do it for FOP. Looking at the source to dvipdfm, it looks like it (lazily) parses the pdf file, scrounges through the page tree, and includes a reference to the first page. This should be doable in the FOP framework as well. -Pete-r - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Alternative to SVG
Hi again, Further to the message I sent a few minutes ago suggesting pstoedit for EPS to SVG conversion - I've had a quick play, and it seems that there are two ways to make pstoedit create SVG. Either you pay $50 to enable the shareware SVG back-end, or use use -f plot-svg. This uses GNU libplot, so maybe it relies on you having that installed? Anyway it works for me, and it produces SVG for free. Batik, and so presumably also FOP, object to it having fill-rule:even-odd. I haven't checked whether that it the fault of pstoedit or Batik, but just deleting that attribute makes it work. This certainly looks like a good way of getting EPS into FOP documents. For the test that I've been looking at the file size increased from about 40k to about 70k. --Phil. Have you seen pstoedit? (http://www.pstoedit.net/). This will convert postscript to a variety of vector graphics formats, and it DOESN'T convert it to a bitmap first, so you should keep the original quality. The free version doesn't support SVG output; you can get a demo with SVG support, but it converts e to $ and messes up the colours. Real SVG support costs $50. It seems to be available for Windows, Linux and Solaris. My experience is only limited, but it does seem to work for the things that I've thrown at it. I haven't entirely worked out how to get the bounding box right yet. Good luck, --Phil. - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Re: Alternative to SVG
In the PDF specs I actually found something about including PostScript. Chapter 4.10 PostScript XObjects might be a solution but it also says there: Note: Since PDF 1.3 encompasses all of the Adobe imaging model features of the PostScript language, there is no longer any reason to use PostScript XObjects. This feature is likely to be removed from PDF in a future version. Someone would have to write some code that can import EPS files and save the PostScript portion in a PostScript XObject. The note above suggests that the generating application should be able to convert EPS/PostScript into PDF. This is probably quite a task, right? Another possibility might be to extend the PostScript renderer to be able to embed EPS files. But then the generated PostScript file would have to be converted to PDF using Distiller, GhostScript, Jaws PDF Library or something else. On 30.10.2001 18:39:09 Bill Lawrence wrote: The simplest approach would be to find an FO processor that can handle .eps. I'm somewhat surprised that this isn't built into FOP, given that it is designed to convert FO to PDF. Wouldn't it be logical for such a tool to therefore support PostScript graphics? Cheers, Jeremias Märki mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] OUTLINE AG Postfach 3954 - Rhynauerstr. 15 - 6002 Luzern Fon +41 (0)41 317 2020 - Fax +41 (0)41 317 2029 Internet http://www.outline.ch - To unsubscribe, e-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] For additional commands, email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
