Transparency support for postscript output
Hi all,
I am assuming that postscript not having transparency natively would be the reason for inkscape not supporting transparency in EPS or postscript outputs. What would be required to implement support for this?
Ashwin
On Thu, 20 Jan 2005, Ashwin Bharambe wrote:
Hi all,
I am assuming that postscript not having transparency natively would be the reason for inkscape not supporting transparency in EPS or postscript outputs. What would be required to implement support for this?
That's correct.
To implement support for it, I believe it would require changing out the version of Postscript that Inkscape uses.
Would you be interested in working on this?
Bryce
On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 20:01:03 -0500, Ashwin Bharambe <ashwinb@...400...> wrote:
Hi all,
I am assuming that postscript not having transparency natively would be the reason for inkscape not supporting transparency in EPS or postscript outputs.
Yes.
What would be required to implement support for this?
Other apps fake it by "flattening" objects and, if necessary, partly rasterizing them so that the output looks the same but does not require transparency. I'm not in favor of us doing the same: it's very difficult to implement, and plain PS is a thing of the past anyway. Most users of PS have migrated to PDF, which has native transparency since 1.4. So what we should work on is a decent PDF exporter instead.
Thanks for your reply. I agree that postscript is getting older, but I wouldn't go as far as to say "a thing of the past" :) In particular, I find myself using postscript (and .eps figures) in LaTeX documents and that is why I wanted good support for drawing diagrams and converting them to EPS. (I know, I could use pdflatex, however that has a few issues sometimes.)
I wonder whether the pdf -> postscript converters handle transparency well.
Ashwin
On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 21:11:49 -0400, bulia byak <buliabyak@...400...> wrote:
On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 20:01:03 -0500, Ashwin Bharambe <ashwinb@...400...> wrote:
Hi all,
I am assuming that postscript not having transparency natively would be the reason for inkscape not supporting transparency in EPS or postscript outputs.
Yes.
What would be required to implement support for this?
Other apps fake it by "flattening" objects and, if necessary, partly rasterizing them so that the output looks the same but does not require transparency. I'm not in favor of us doing the same: it's very difficult to implement, and plain PS is a thing of the past anyway. Most users of PS have migrated to PDF, which has native transparency since 1.4. So what we should work on is a decent PDF exporter instead.
On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 21:04:22 -0500, Ashwin Bharambe <ashwinb@...400...> wrote:
Thanks for your reply. I agree that postscript is getting older, but I wouldn't go as far as to say "a thing of the past" :) In particular, I find myself using postscript (and .eps figures) in LaTeX documents and that is why I wanted good support for drawing diagrams and converting them to EPS.
Well, to be fair, LaTeX and especially TeX are even older than PS :)
And for all these years, people used them just fine without any transparency support (in either TeX or PS). So of course I'm not suggesting that you drop them if they work for you, but please understand that these technologies hardly develop anymore. They both are likely to still be used many years from now, but they are just not those places where exciting new things (such as transparency) tend to happen.
On Thu, 20 Jan 2005 21:04:22 -0500, Ashwin Bharambe <ashwinb@...400...> wrote:
Thanks for your reply. I agree that postscript is getting older, but I wouldn't go as far as to say "a thing of the past" :) In particular, I find myself using postscript (and .eps figures) in LaTeX documents and that is why I wanted good support for drawing diagrams and converting them to EPS. (I know, I could use pdflatex, however that has a few issues sometimes.)
Your roundabout has a name: Scribus :)
You can import EPS/PS/SVG to a Scribus document and print it to a PDF 1.4 or 1.5 file (or even back to EPS or SVG or even to a bitmap). There already is a Adobe Reader 7.0 beta1 available for download. It supports PDF 1.5 (Acrobat Reader 5.05 didn't).
Alexandre
Your roundabout has a name: Scribus :)
You can import EPS/PS/SVG to a Scribus document and print it to a PDF 1.4 or 1.5 file (or even back to EPS or SVG or even to a bitmap). There already is a Adobe Reader 7.0 beta1 available for download. It supports PDF 1.5 (Acrobat Reader 5.05 didn't).
Well, but IIRC the start and end points of gradients still have to be within the objects, text doesn't work and the sizing in Sscribus is a pain.
David
On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 19:44:28 +0100, Tobias Jakobs <tobias.jakobs@...128...> wrote:
Am Samstag, den 22.01.2005, 20:52 +0300 schrieb Alexandre Prokoudine:
There already is a Adobe Reader 7.0 beta1 available for download. It supports PDF 1.5 (Acrobat Reader 5.05 didn't).
Sorry for being off topic, but where can I get the Adobe Reader 7.0 beta1?
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
Choose "English" and "Linux" and go through several web forms
It is based on gtk2 (finally a decent UI on linux :)). But I don't recommend beta1 it for daily use: it often crashes, when you try to open a document via usual gtk2 "Open file" dialog.
Alexandre
On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 22:30:14 +0300, Alexandre Prokoudine <alexandre.prokoudine@...400...> wrote:
On Sat, 22 Jan 2005 19:44:28 +0100, Tobias Jakobs <tobias.jakobs@...128...> wrote:
Am Samstag, den 22.01.2005, 20:52 +0300 schrieb Alexandre Prokoudine:
There already is a Adobe Reader 7.0 beta1 available for download. It supports PDF 1.5 (Acrobat Reader 5.05 didn't).
Sorry for being off topic, but where can I get the Adobe Reader 7.0 beta1?
http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat/readstep2.html
Choose "English" and "Linux" and go through several web forms
Erm, sorry. Doesn't seem to work anymore :(
Try to search for AdbeRdr70_linux_enu.0.beta1.tar.bz2 in Google.
Alexandre
Ashwin Bharambe wrote:
Hi all,
I am assuming that postscript not having transparency natively would be the reason for inkscape not supporting transparency in EPS or postscript outputs. What would be required to implement support for this?
Ashwin
It would take a volunteer who would take the time to read the 3 Adobe Postscript 3 books, and write a driver for it. We have been begging for one for months now. ;-)
Bob
On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 09:58:26 -0600, Bob Jamison <rjamison@...357...> wrote:
It would take a volunteer who would take the time to read the 3 Adobe Postscript 3 books, and write a driver for it. We have been begging for one for months now. ;-)
PS3 still has no transparency. It has gradients, though, which previous levels didn't have. I don't think it's worth the trouble to implement it for gradients only, because without transparency it will always be incomplete.
On Fri, 2005-01-21 at 15:52, bulia byak wrote:
PS3 still has no transparency. It has gradients, though, which previous levels didn't have. I don't think it's worth the trouble to implement it for gradients only, because without transparency it will always be incomplete.
For what it's wroth, some postscript implementations are beginning to add support for the additional operators from PDF, like alpha.
(actual vector graphics in PDF use fragments of limited PostScript, with some extra operators for PDF features)
-mental
Bob Jamison wrote:
Ashwin Bharambe wrote:
Hi all,
I am assuming that postscript not having transparency natively would be the reason for inkscape not supporting transparency in EPS or postscript outputs. What would be required to implement support for this?
It would take a volunteer who would take the time to read the 3 Adobe Postscript 3 books, and write a driver for it. We have been begging for one for months now. ;-)
I don't think that Postscript, even PS3, supports transparency. I think the best strategy is to create PDF within inkscape, and plug in a 3rd party pdf tool (distiller or ghostscript) to flatten to PS.
John
On Fri, 21 Jan 2005 09:58:26 -0600, Bob Jamison <rjamison@...357...> wrote:
It would take a volunteer who would take the time to read the 3 Adobe Postscript 3 books, and write a driver for it.
Or the one who will investigate code from Scribus + lcms + PDF? :)
Alexandre
participants (9)
-
Alexandre Prokoudine -
Ashwin Bharambe -
Bob Jamison -
Bryce Harrington -
bulia byak -
David Christian Berg -
John Pybus -
MenTaLguY -
Tobias Jakobs