As updates appear down the road, this document will be the quickest path to learning what has changed since the previous release. A list of known problems/limitations in the current release appears at the end of this document.
Changes from Version 1.0 to 1.1
New Features
• A text extraction feature has been added. Choosing the "Macintosh Text" option in the Preferences dialog causes epsConverter to enter "text extraction mode." This will result in the creation of simple ASCII text files (with Macintosh character encoding) whose contents contain only the text portions of the input EPS files. This is useful for simply browsing the textual content of EPS files or for doing text searches. Note that the initial implementation is quite simple and does not account for such issues as the text's location on the original EPS page, etc. The text files can be opened with TeachText/SimpleText, or with any text editor or word processor.
• The error dialog is now somewhat more informational. If you experience an error which displays only a number with no descriptive text, please let us know.
Bug Fixes
• Several cosmetic bugs in the progress dialog have been fixed:
(1) When converting more than 186 files at once, the progress indicator would get stuck.
(2) There was excessive flickering while updating the progress bar.
(3) When converting a folder of several short files, user events (such as attempting to cancel) were ignored.
• A rogue debugger break which was accidentally left active has been disabled.
• For dashed lines, the length of the dash array is now capped at 6. EPS files normally allow up to 11 dash parameters, while Illustrator allows only 6. As a result, some EPS files caused epsConverter to generate dash arrays which were too large for Illustrator to handle. The symptom was that Illustrator would display an error dialog after attempting to read the file, complaining about the "d" operator.
• A problem was fixed which caused some files to trigger a limitcheck error while executing the clip operator. This was most common with files generated by the LaserWriter 7.x driver.
• The bounding box is now more accurate, especially for files containing text.
• The statusdict implementation is more complete, for better compatibility with PostScript print-to-disk files as well as ill-behaved EPS files.
• When converting a folder which contained subfolders, the folder hierarchy was not preserved in the converted folder. It was flattened so that all converted files were placed in a single output folder. This is no longer the case.
Known Problems and Limitations
• Stroked Text
Photoshop does not rasterize stroked text. A future release will offer
the option of generating path data for stroked text so that it is rasterized
by Photoshop.
• Placed Images
Bitmap images are converted into placed images in the Illustrator file.
These print fine, but are of limited use since Illustrator has no raster
manipulation tools (it is a vector-only package), and thus does not display
them. Even worse, when opening a converted document with embedded
placed images, Illustrator will prompt for the location of each placed image,
ignoring the fact that the data is embedded in the file itself. This is a
limitation of Illustrator. As a work-around, a future release of epsConverter
will offer the option of saving placed images into separate Photoshop-
compatible raster EPS files.
• Binary Headers/Trailers
EPS files with binary headers and trailers currently choke epsConverter's
parser. The symptom is a failure to convert with error #20 and a log
entry that looks something like the following:
%%[ Error: undefined; OffendingCommand: ≈–”Δ ]%%
This is most common with PC/DOS/Windows EPS files with embedded
TIFF previews. A future release will correct this problem. For now,
the work-around is to open the file in a text editor and delete all characters
preceding the "%!PS" at the front of the file, as well as all "funny"
characters at the end of the file before converting.
• Font Re-encoding.
When a font re-encoding uses a glyph which is not normally
defined by the standard PostScript encoding vector, the glyph
is treated as ".notdef" and is replaced by the NULL character.
Only reencoding of StandardEncoding is supported. Symbol
encoding and other special encodings are not supported.
• Patterns
epsConverter does not generate Illustrator patterns.
An interesting side-effect of this is that you can convert
a file which is already in Illustrator EPS format, and patterns
will be simplified into lower-level objects. The resulting
Illustrator file will be larger than the original file, but it
can be read into applications such as Photoshop, which normally
ignore patterns, (and the patterns will be rasterized!)
• eofill and eoclip Operators Not Emulated
EPS files may make use of these two operators as an alternate
way to fill and clip paths. The Illustrator file format does
not support the use of these operators directly, so they must
be emulated. In this release, these operators are simply
treated as though they were the fill and clip operators,
respectively. The result is that some paths and masks may be
completely filled in, when they should actually contain interior holes.
• clippath Operator Not Fully Emulated
The clippath operator is used to turn a clipping mask into a path object
that can be filled or stroked. Use of this operator in an EPS file
may result in a translation with undefined drawing behavior.
• Non-Uniform Pen Scaling
Some EPS files may scale user space non-uniformly in x and y.
That is, they may stretch the vertical axis by a different
amount then they stretch the horizontal axis. In this case,
the pen's shape is also supposed to be scaled non-uniformly,
with the result that stroked lines will have varying width
depending upon their orientation, and their end caps will be skewed.
epsConverter will correctly handle all effects of non-uniform
scaling EXCEPT for its effect on line widths and end cap skewing.
It is our opinion that this case arises infrequently enough as to not
warrant attention in the first release. Let us know if you believe otherwise.
• Halftone Screens
Any halftone screens set in the EPS file are ignored.
Halftone screens are device-dependent and do not have
