[Bug 67465] EPS rendering: locating pstoedit on Mac a problem

https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/show_bug.cgi?id=67465

Robert R. Howell <rhowell@uwyo.edu> changed:

           What    |Removed                     |Added
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
                 CC|                            |rhowell@uwyo.edu

--- Comment #23 from Robert R. Howell <rhowell@uwyo.edu> ---
Created attachment 119006
  --> https://bugs.documentfoundation.org/attachment.cgi?id=119006&action=edit
Patch so gs rendering is prefered over pstoedit

I appreciate the efforts to build in EPS rendering but as that looks like it
won't happen soon what I'd really like to see is a way to restore the behavior
of LibreOffice to what it was in 4.1, where it used gs to produce reasonable
quality EPS images.  I've attached a very simple patch which does that, not
just for display, but also for printing and for PDF export.  I've also attached
a png file showing how very bad the current pstoedit based results can be.  I
should say the cases I've tested are all EPS figures which do NOT contain built
in previews.

The fix has really just been reversing the order of the RenderAsEMF and
RenderAsBMP calls in filter/source/graphicfilter/ieps/ieps.cxx so that BMP is
tried first.  However in the attached patch I wrapped that change in an
if_else_then controlled by whether the environment variable
LO_PREFER_GS_FOR_EPS is defined.  Doing so means the change is not enabled by
default, and you can test the effect of the change without recompiling.  The
behavior should really be controlled by some new option in the LibreOffice
settings, but that was much more than I wanted to try.

I know you've heard it before from others, but I'd like to emphasize just how
bad a regression this change away from GS towards pstoedit has been.  In any
practical sense for those of us who have existing documents using EPS plots
this has a major loss-of-data bug.  In my case I've been using LibreOffice for
my main research notebooks for the past several years.  I use EPS for many
figures because it IS still THE STANDARD in many scientific publications. 
After upgrading to LibreOffice 4.2 I discovered that many of the critical plots
in those notebooks had been turned into unreadable garbage.  And it's
completely impractical to go back over years of work and try to recreate the
plots in some other format.  If I've been less vocal in this forum than others
its only because I'd kept multiple backups in multiple formats, including
PDF's.  But if I hadn't noticed the plot corruption, I could have accidentally
overwritten those.  After this, I'm probably going to start keeping paper
copies again as an ultimate backup.  I've also been able to keep an old 4.1.x
version working until recently.  But others haven't been as lucky.

I know this patch may not fix all the problems with EPS rendering (especially
where previews DO exist) and the use of the environment variable to control
behavior isn't ideal, but this DOES restore the good EPS rendering that
LibreOffice had for me in version 4.1.6.  I hope you can incorporate some
version of this.  It really is important for any of us who rely on EPS
graphics.

-- 
You are receiving this mail because:
You are on the CC list for the bug.