Overview

pstoedit translates PostScript graphics into other vector formats.

Supported Formats

Currently pstoedit can generate the following major formats:

• Tgif .obj format (for tgif version >= 3)
• .fig format for xfig
• pdf - Adobe's Portable Document Format
• gnuplot format
• Flattened PostScript (with or without Bezier curves)
• DXF - CAD exchange format
• LWO - LightWave 3D
• RIB - RenderMan
• RPL - Real3D
• Java 1 or Java 2 applet
• Idraw format (in fact a special form of EPS that idraw can read)
• Tcl/Tk
• HPGL
• AI (Adobe Illustrator) (based on ps2ai.ps - not a real pstoedit driver - see notes below and manual)
• Windows Meta Files (WMF) (Windows only)
• Enhanced Windows Meta Files (EMF) (Windows, but also Linux/Unix if libemf is available)
• OS/2 meta files (OS/2 only)
• PIC format for troff/groff
• MetaPost format for usage with TeX/LaTeX
• LaTeX2e picture
• Kontour
• Asymptote
• Sketch
• GNU Metafile (plotutils / libplot)
• Using GNU libplot also these formats are available
  • CGM
  • AI
  • SVG
  • FIG
  • HPGL
  • PCL
• Skencil ( http://www.skencil.org )
• Mathematica graphics
• via ImageMagick to any format supported by ImageMagick
• CNC G code
• PCB format
• gschem format
• CDFG
• VTK files for ParaView and similar visualization tools
• PPTX files for PowerPoint

Besides these, some further very special formats are supported. See the pstoedit.htm for a complete list of available drivers.

The following formats are available on request from the author as additional plugins.

• (Frame)Maker Intermediate Format (MIF)
• CGM Format (both binary and textual)
• Better Enhanced Windows Meta Files (EMF) (supports curves and compound paths and does more accurate text formatting) (MS Windows only)
• RTF (MS Word) (MS Windows only)

Implementing support for other formats should be very easy. The architecture of pstoedit consists of a PostScript frontend which needs to call a PostScript interpreter like Ghostscript and the individual backends which are plugged into a kind of framework. This framework can be used independently from the PostScript frontend from any other program. The framework provides a uniform interface to all different backends. You need a C++ compiler to compile and Ghostscript to run pstoedit. pstoedit should run on all Un*x like systems (including Cygwin) and Windows systems.

Since version 3.00 it is possible to add new drivers without even recompiling the core program. pstoedit can load additional drivers as plugins.

Important note regarding support for PDF files as input

Download

You can download pstoedit:

• Source code on Github: pstoedit on Github
• Tarballs and binary releases for Windows on Github: pstoedit releases on Github On Windows you can also simply use "winget install pstoedit" from a terminal to install the latest version of pstoedit.
• For Windows, you might need to install also the Visual Studion 2019 redistributable runtime files. If you get the error message "could not open C:\Program Files\pstoedit\pstoedit.DLL" when running pstoedit, then this indicates that the runtime files are missing. You can get them from here (one of the vc_redist packages).

More Information

You get can more information from:

• The manual,
• The readme file.
• The change log of the last release

pstoedit also cooperates with autotrace. Autotrace can 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/

Related Links

Some links more or less related to pstoedit can be found here.

Primary Author

Donations

Pstoedit at Coverity Scan by Black Duck

Pstoedit at Facebook

Mailing List

There is an e-mail list for people that want to be informed about updates and bug-fixes related to pstoedit.