On Mon, 20 Aug 2007 15:18:48 -0400, "bulia byak" <buliabyak@...155...> wrote:
On 8/20/07, John R. Culleton <john@...1668...> wrote:
EPS is AFAIK a vector format. svg is a vector format. So why can't Inkscape import it?
Because converting between vector formats is very difficult. It's nothing like converting between bitmap formats. It's more like rewriting an arbitrarily complex program from one programming language to another.
It isn't just that -- in the case of EPS, specifically, it really is a programming language. There's no way to write a general-purpose EPS importer without implementing the entire PostScript runtime to execute EPS files.
It's possible to leverage an existing runtime like Ghostscript (which is what pstoedit does), but I know from personal experience that there's still an awful lot of glue that needs to go in to make it usable.
This issue is one of the reasons that Adobe switched to PDF instead of EPS -- it's much easier to implement PDF import because it is much simpler than a general-purpose programming language like PostScript. And, indeed, PDF import is one of our SoC projects this summer.
-mental