pstoedit

Overview

pstoedit translates PostScript and PDF graphics into other vector formats.

Supported Formats

Currently pstoedit can generate the following major formats:

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.

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

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.

Download

You can download pstoedit:

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

Download pstoedit

More Information

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/

Related Links

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


Primary Author

Wolfgang Glunz email: wglunz35_AT_pstoedit.net http://de.linkedin.com/in/wolfgangglunz

Donations

Donations to the pstoedit project are welcome and can be done easily here:

Pstoedit at Coverity

Coverity Scan Build Status

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.

groups.google.com/g/pstoedit
Impressum
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Wolfgang Glunz email: wglunz35_AT_pstoedit.net http://de.linkedin.com/in/wolfgangglunz