Overview

pstoedit translates PostScript and PDF 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
• 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.

Important note regarding support for PDF files as input

Download

You can download pstoedit:

• Source tarball:pstoedit-4.00.tar.gz
• binary for Windows 32 bit (version 3.78)
• binary for Windows 64 bit
• if above links do not work for you, try this.
• additional plugins
• 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).

In case of download problems, visit this page via the alternate URL or

More Information

You get can more information from:

• The manual,
• The readme file.
• The change log

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

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Mailing List

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