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asciighostscripteps

Create ASCII-only EPS with eps2write

I have plain ASCII EPS files where I need to convert text to paths. I do this in the following manner:

gs -sDEVICE=eps2write -dNoOutputFonts -o out.eps in.eps

The resulting EPS contains some binary streams like this:

enter image description here

It seems that distiller parameters can also be used for PostScript output devices (to me, the PostScript output looks pretty much like PDF with some header that implements PDF functionality in PostScript). However, in the documentation I did not see an obvious parameter that would make Ghostscript encode the streams using an ASCII-only encoding. My best guess was the UseFlateCompression option, which did not have an effect:

gs -sDEVICE=eps2write -o out.eps -c '<</UseFlateCompression false>> setdistillerparams' -f in.eps
Solution

  • You are correct that the distiller parameters also affect the (e)ps2write device, where appropriate. And also that the ps2write output is, broadly, a PDF file with a prolog which defines specific routines to deal with the PDF operators (this isn't quite true, but its very close).

    Setting UseFlateCompression to false has no effect, as per the documentation. If it did it would simply switch it to LZWCompression, which really wouldn't help you.

    As regards ASCII only encoding, there is no option to do that, per object or stream, but you can select the (e)ps2write-specific flag '-dCompressEntireFile' which will LZWEncode the whole file and then apply ASCII-85 encoding to that.

    The reason this isn't the default (it used to be) is because we had reports against certain PostScript printers which were unable to deal with this combination (the bug is in the printers, not the PostScript program) and we had to change the default to better support those printers.

    This should result in an ASCII EPS file, if that is your goal, though obviously that shouldn't really be any more necessary than not Encoding it.....

    By the way, the documentation you link to is the 9.16 release, you should really consider using the current release, and the documentation which goes with it. The switch is documented in vectordevices.htm in section 6.5 "PostScript file output"