pstoedit translates PostScript and PDF graphics into other vector 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
- GNU Metafile (plotutils / libplot)
- Skencil ( http://www.skencil.org
)
- Mathematica
- via ImageMagick to any format supported by ImageMagick
- SWF
- CNC G code
- 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 as additional plugins on a
shareware basis. See http://www.pstoedit.net/plugins/
for more details.
- (Frame)Maker Intermediate Format (MIF)
- CGM Format (both binary and textual)
- SVG - Scalable Vector Graphics format. One candidate of
the W3C for a web standard for vector drawings. See http://www.w3.org/Graphics/SVG/
for more details.
- 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 pugged 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 has also been ported to
OS/2, MS Windows 9x/NT/2K/XP/Vista, and RiscOS.
Since version 3.00 it is possible to add new drivers without
even recompiling the core program. pstoedit can load additional
drivers as plugins.
pstoedit uses GhostScript for the hard work of processing PostScript and PDF.
Up to version of 9.55.0, GhostScript's PDF interpreter is based on PostScript itself and hence the hooks created by pstoedit
into the PostScript interpreter worked the same way for native PostScript input as for PDF input.
From version 9.56.0 on GhostScript has a different way of rendering PDF files - see
https://ghostscript.com/pdfi.html -
and that will break the mechanism used by pstoedit. For a certain time, the old way of reading PDF files will still
be included - and then pstoedit could use that legacay mode. But in the longer term, even that will be dropped to my
current information.
After that a PDF file will have to be converted to PostScript before it can be processed by pstoedit.
You can download pstoedit:
In case of download problems, visit this page via the
alternate URL or
You get can more information from:
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/
Some links more or less related to pstoedit can be found
here.
Wolfgang Glunz email: wglunz35_AT_pstoedit.net
http://de.linkedin.com/in/wolfgangglunz
Donations to the pstoedit project are welcome and can be done easily here:
There is an e-mail list for people that want to be informed
about updates and bug-fixes related to pstoedit.
groups.google.com/g/pstoedit
Impressum
Privacy Policy
Wolfgang Glunz email: wglunz35_AT_pstoedit.net
http://de.linkedin.com/in/wolfgangglunz