Re: what's the nice package to open eps file
On 2012-01-03 19:37:06 +1100, Scott Ferguson wrote:
> On 03/01/12 16:09, Vincent Lefevre wrote:
> > First, GIMP is an editing tool, not a viewing tool.
>
> And? So? You want to argue that it not a good editor, without knowing
> if the OP wanted and editor. Then you argue that it's not a viewer -
GIMP is a tool to edit bitmaps, while EPS is a vector format. So,
while GIMP can be used to view EPS files, with several drawbacks
(as already explained), its editing feature is completely useless
here. Said otherwise, GIMP could be useful here only to view the
EPS file, so you have lots of useless features (thus as I've said,
a more complex UI, and GIMP is slower to load, probably takes more
memory...).
> but the only alternative you've proposed is an editor.
Because I initially thought you wanted to propose an editor.
There was another answer also giving viewers, so I didn't feel
the need to mention them as well.
> Will we pretend you can't view with and editor?
See above. But also, GIMP is just a bitmap viewer: if you zoom,
the bitmap will be zoomed (thus with a bad quality), not the
original contents.
> Despite your myopic fixation, GIMP was *one* of a few I listed that, on
> my system (based on a minimal KDE) would "display as an image" an .eps
A .eps is not just an image, but a vector image. Normally its
MIME type is not image/... but application/postscript (probably
for historical reasons):
$ grep -P '\beps\b' /etc/mime.types
application/postscript ps ai eps epsi epsf eps2 eps3
On my machine:
$ grep application/postscript /etc/mailcap
application/postscript; fbgs -c '%s'; test=test -z "$DISPLAY"; needsterminal
application/postscript; /usr/bin/gv '%s'; test=test -n "$DISPLAY"; description=postscript
I wonder why evince isn't mentioned at all in /etc/mailcap. A bug?
> The OP was/is running XFCE - hence the suggestions were limited to what
> might be already on their system. You remember the OP? The owner of the
> thread you've been hijacking.
The goal of my post is to tell the OP *not* to use GIMP (what you did
propose). That's not hijacking the thread!
> As someone with a passion for proper rendering perhaps you could list
> some programs to display .eps files as vector images (with a simple UI
> and fast to load).
As already said by Roger Leigh: gv (that was more or less the original
viewer and its UI hasn't evolved, and one can find it a bit primitive,
but it is really fast) and evince.
> I'm loathe to suggest people install Scribus/Inkscape, the old Adobe SVG
> plugin for their browser, or Xara, just to look at an .eps file.
Agreed.
> I don't know about XFCE, Gnome et al, but on a stock KDE there doesn't
> seem to be a SVG "viewer" capable of displaying an .eps as a vector image.
I don't know if there's any (that could support both natively). Well,
there could be any web browser with the right plugin (possibly after
transparent EPS to PDF conversion).
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@vinc17.net> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
100% accessible validated (X)HTML - Blog: <http://www.vinc17.net/blog/>
Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arénaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)
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