DAMTP Computing News

Some time ago we installed a version (3.33) of pstoedit, but accidentally broke it during an upgrade of ghostscript (there were hardwired paths in it). A test version (3.42) was installed locally on a few machines, and since none of the testers reported any problems, it was installed (locally) on all the Linux (SL3) machines a couple of days ago, and as a result the old pstoedit will be removed.

For those who havn't used pstoedit before, it converts PostScript and PDF files to various vector graphic formats. The resulting files can be edited or imported into various drawing packages. e.g. one can transform pdf or ps figures into fig format for editing in xfig.

From the pstoedit documentation:

     PRINCIPLE OF CONVERSION
      pstoedit works by redefining the some basic painting operators of
      PostScript, e.g.  stroke or show (bitmaps drawn by the image operator are
      not supported by all backends.) After redefining these operators, the
      PostScript or PDF file that needs to be converted is processed by a
      PostScript interpreter, e.g., Ghostscript (gs(1)).  ...
      The output that is written by the interpreter due to the redefinition of
      the drawing operators is a sort of 'flat' PostScript file that contains
      only simple operations like moveto, lineto, show, etc. ...
      This output is read by end-processing functions of pstoedit and triggers
      the drawing functions in the selected back end driver, or backend.

Note that ps/pdf files may contain bitmaps which can't be broken up into editable pieces by pstoedit, but output generated by many packages can generally be usefully converted.