Arranging Complex EPS files into a larger document?
I deperately want to use Inkscape.
I am making a scientific poster, which in practice means collecting a bunch of plot and images I've made over the past few months and putting them together with a little text and perhaps a few line drawings into a nice looking 3ft x 4ft document that I will print on a large format printer. These plots and images tend to be EPS files but they can be rather diverse.
I basically haven't gotten Inkscape to usefully import an EPS file. For larger, more complex ones, it responds with a dialog box saying it couldn't be converted. Even smaller, simpler ones don't seem to have the correct bounding box (they're clipped).
I would in fact be just as happy if Inkscape _didn't_ convert the EPS files to its native format. I'm eventually going to export the whole thing to Postscript (or at least I have in the past) anyway, so if I can just place boxes where I want the plots and then have them show up in the Postscript output, that'd be great.
As it stands, the only program I can find that seems to do what I want is... Xfig.
So I guess I'm asking asking: 0) Am I crazy for trying to do what I'm trying to do? Ie, is there a much better approach that I'm not seeing? 1) General tips for dealing with importing EPS files and arranging them into larger documents? Should I convert them to something else first? I'd like to avoid rasterizing them. 2) Any links to battle-hardened tools for converting between vector file formats?
Thanks for any guidance, Greg
Hi Greg,
For what you describe, it sounds like perhaps what you need isn't Inkscape itself but rather Inkscape's sister project Scribus. Scribus has perhaps the best PDF/EPS/PS support in the OSS community, plus it understand's Inkscape's SVG format better than any other gfx program. By trade it's a "desktop publishing" program, which means it's geared for handling the work of integrating text and graphics of various formats.
It works much differently than Inkscape, so plan on dedicating some time to learning it. Also, it's Qt rather than Gtk based, so don't be surprised that it's look and feel is a bit different too.
Bryce
On Thu, Jun 02, 2005 at 10:20:27PM -0700, Greg Novak wrote:
I deperately want to use Inkscape.
I am making a scientific poster, which in practice means collecting a bunch of plot and images I've made over the past few months and putting them together with a little text and perhaps a few line drawings into a nice looking 3ft x 4ft document that I will print on a large format printer. These plots and images tend to be EPS files but they can be rather diverse.
I basically haven't gotten Inkscape to usefully import an EPS file. For larger, more complex ones, it responds with a dialog box saying it couldn't be converted. Even smaller, simpler ones don't seem to have the correct bounding box (they're clipped).
I would in fact be just as happy if Inkscape _didn't_ convert the EPS files to its native format. I'm eventually going to export the whole thing to Postscript (or at least I have in the past) anyway, so if I can just place boxes where I want the plots and then have them show up in the Postscript output, that'd be great.
As it stands, the only program I can find that seems to do what I want is... Xfig.
So I guess I'm asking asking: 0) Am I crazy for trying to do what I'm trying to do? Ie, is there a much better approach that I'm not seeing?
- General tips for dealing with importing EPS files and arranging them into larger documents? Should I convert them to something else first? I'd like to avoid rasterizing them.
- Any links to battle-hardened tools for converting between vector file formats?
Thanks for any guidance, Greg
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On 6/3/05, Greg Novak <novak@...730...> wrote:
bunch of plot and images I've made over the past few months
Just next time, plan to make all your images in SVG from the start :)
Our EPS import is almost nonexistent. Our EPS export, however, is quite adequate.
For EPS->SVG conversion, you can try Scribus, Adobe Illustrator or pstoedit.
bulia byak wrote:
On 6/3/05, Greg Novak <novak@...730...> wrote:
bunch of plot and images I've made over the past few months
Just next time, plan to make all your images in SVG from the start :)
Our EPS import is almost nonexistent. Our EPS export, however, is quite adequate.
For EPS->SVG conversion, you can try Scribus, Adobe Illustrator or pstoedit.
I recently used pstoedit to convert some EPS pictures to SVG, it did the job quite well. You will probably have to make some adjustments afterwards, because the SVG export plugin of pstoedit is actually shareware. It intentionally introduces some distortions (color changes, and replacing "e" by "$") until you pay for registration.
Regards, Arnout
participants (4)
-
Arnout Standaert -
Bryce Harrington -
bulia byak -
Greg Novak