Subject: MacOSX-TeX Digest #194 - 12/31/01
Date: Monday, December 31, 2001 8:00 PM
From: TeX on Mac OS X Mailing List
To: TeX on Mac OS X Mailing List
MacOSX-TeX Digest #194 - Monday, December 31, 2001
Incorrect ps2epsi behavior?
by "Francesco Costanzo"
Re: TeX fonts and Illustrator 10
by "Jacques Distler"
New (?) utility (??) for viewing page structure
by
Re: [Mac OS X TeX] Re: TeX fonts and Illustrator 10
by "Bruno Voisin"
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Incorrect ps2epsi behavior?
From: "Francesco Costanzo"
Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2001 20:52:18 -0500
This message is being sent to bug-gs@aladdin.com and carbon-copied to the
Mac OS X TeX Mailing list:
Sometimes we (myself and Gray L. Gray, a colleague of mine) create
PostScript files consisting of a single page with a figure in it using
LaTeX. As you may already know, these PostScript files have the following
bounding box:
%%BoundingBox: 0 0 612 792
in other words, the bounding box of the entire page. In addition, these
files have no preview. We are interested in creating .eps and .pdf files
containing just the content of the page, say a figure with the appropriate
bounding box. To do this,
[1] we use ps2epsi to create an .eps file with a bounding box and preview;
[2] we use epstopdf to create the corresponding .pdf file.
Here is the problem: we have found that the .epsi file created by ps2epsi
will often have a bounding box which is too small, thus clipping part of the
page content. For example, if we apply ps2epsi to one of our .ps files, we
get the following bbox:
%%BoundingBox: 111 435 378 666
If we run the following Ghostscript command:
gs -sDEVICE=bbox file.ps
on the same .ps file, we get:
%%BoundingBox: 110 434 379 667
%%HiResBoundingBox: 110.897997 434.627987 378.413988 666.377980
Notice that ps2epsi is simply rounding to the nearest integer, while gs
rounds to the nearest lower integer for the llx and lly and to the nearest
greater integer for urx and ury. Of course, if one uses epstopdf on the
resulting .epsi file, the bounding box from the .epsi file is used and
therefore clipping occurs in the resulting .pdf file.
We should mention that for this particular example, the use of the bounding
box as provided by gs would not cause the "clipping" described earlier. In
addition, ps2epsi does not include any HiRes bbox info. This is not a big
deal, but it would be nice to have the information as it can be used as an
option in running epstopdf.
Is there a reason for this behavior? Is there any way for us to fix ps2epsi
so that it behaves the way we want it to behave? If it is a bug is there
hope of a fix in a future release (possibly soon :-))?
--
Best Regards,
Francesco Costanzo
Associate Professor
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
Address: Engineering Science and Mechanics Department
The Pennsylvania State University
212 Earth and Engineering Sciences Bldg.
University Park, PA 16802-1401
USA
Phone: (814)863-2030
Fax: (814)863-7967
mailto:costanzo@engr.psu.edu
http://www.esm.psu.edu/HTMLs/Faculty/FCostanzo.html
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: TeX fonts and Illustrator 10
From: "Jacques Distler"
Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2001 19:57:30 -0600
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1
On Sunday, December 30, 2001, at 07:00 PM, "Alessio Guglielmi"
wrote:
> Now, Tom Kiffe's macdvi makes for an excellent previewer, because
> it's fast and the quality of fonts on screen is better than that of
> ghostscript (I use Type 1).
>
> I could have the same quality of fonts, and maybe also the same
> speed, by using pdfTeX, but this is not an option (as far as I know)
> with XyPic, since I make use of postscript specials.
>
> So, if I also want to see my figures (and I want) when composing the
> paper, I need a preview attached to them, which I guess must be a
> PICT.
>
> Could I do better? Please consider that speed, quality of fonts,
> XyPic specials are all very important factors for me.
>
TeXShop has two modes of operation, each of which yields a pdf file
viewable either in TeXShop's own previewer or in AcroRead: pdftex or
tex->dvips->ghostscript.
Obviously, you cannot use the former with figures (unless you convert them
to .pdf's). But the latter works fine and is not much slower than using
pdftex (texing takes a good bit longer than the other two steps in the
conversion process).
Unless you have some basic objection to PDF, that's what I would recommend
you use.
JD
-----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE-----
Version: GnuPG v1.0.6 (Darwin)
Comment: PGP Key - http://golem.ph.utexas.edu/~distler/distler.asc
iD8DBQE8L8YSnyqPIXpYcjcRAn2JAJ9RiGL4HCE88kt2GoDgkSb4eA2DDwCgn+QN
dIF02yRHr2pTEKQJsLlCIKE=
=AsKB
-----END PGP SIGNATURE-----
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: New (?) utility (??) for viewing page structure
From:
Date: Sun, 30 Dec 2001 22:22:01 -0500
Hi,
I posted this on comp.text.tex, but figured this would be a
good place too.
If you set things right (\tracingoutput and
\showboxbreadth,\showboxdepth) you get a dump in the
log file of all the items on the pages as they are shipped
out. I wrote something to show me this
visually. If interested, there's a page at
http://homepage.mac.com/~chamlin/boxview/
with a screen shot.
Is there something like this already? If so, I'd be
interested to see how it was approached in the past.
It is written in Objective C for Mac OS X.
Regards,
Chris Hamlin
chamlin@nassau.cv.net
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Subject: Re: [Mac OS X TeX] Re: TeX fonts and Illustrator 10
From: "Bruno Voisin"
Date: Mon, 31 Dec 2001 14:44:29 +0100
> So, if I also want to see my figures (and I want) when composing the
> paper, I need a preview attached to them, which I guess must be a PICT.
There are a couple of nice Classic utilities for working with PS and EPS
files, and in particular for creating previews:
PS2EPS+
http://www.lerup.com/ps2eps.shtml
It's free and worked very well for me in the past (at a time when I was
creating Mathematica curves on a Linux box and writing papers including
them with Textures on a PowerBook). It's based on GhostScript 2.3, so it
might not work with recent PostScript files. I've had it on all my
successive Macintosh's for more than five years now, I don't think it
ever crashed any of them. For very wiggly curves (plots of something
asymptotic to Sqrt[x] Sin[1/x] as x -> 0), it couldn't create previews.
EPSðFactoryú
http://www.artage.com
It's one of several shareware PS/EPS conversion tools available at this
URL. Creates previews, and fixes bounding boxes. There's also EPStoPICT
(the name says it all). Very nice interface, seems to work though I
never used it extensively. With documentation explaining PS <->
Quickdraw conversion issues. GraphicConverter has a setting for using
either GhostScript or EPStoPICT when dealing with EPS files.
However, I agree with the view than working with EPS instead of PDF is
fighting against the tide somehow.
Happy New Year to you all,
Bruno Voisin
----------------------------------------------------------------------
End of MacOSX-TeX Digest
-----------------------------------------------------------------
To UNSUBSCRIBE, send email to with
"unsubscribe macosx-tex" (no quotes) in the body.
For additional HELP, send email to with
"help" (no quotes) in the body.
This list is not moderated, and I am not responsible for
messages posted by third parties.
-----------------------------------------------------------------