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

[Chris Ridd]

On 14 Aug 2014, at 19:19, Eric J. Schwarzenbach <Eric.Schwarzenbach at wrycan.com> 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).

In my last job we tried various things but ended up with saving all our diagrams to PDF format, which XEP rendered *very* nicely into the PDF books. Neither EPS or SVG worked well for us, which may have been weaknesses in XEP, or the other tools we were using to create and convert the artwork.

PDF "just worked", and it was one of the reasons we switched to using XEP from Apache FOP.

We were drawing our artwork in OmniGraffle on the Mac, which has a good Export to PDF option that just exports the actual drawing and not the drawing in an entire A4 page.

I can vaguely recall having to be careful about the fonts used in the diagrams so that they didn't include lots of small embedded fonts in the final book from XEP, but that was the only hassle.

I would hope that Illustrator could export good PDF files, but really you need to test the entire toolchain and workflow yourself.

Chris
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