[libreoffice-users] Re: EPS images in ODT documents

Am 29.01.2011, 15:15 Uhr, schrieb Magnus Johansson  
<e.m.johansson@spray.se>:

> Hello! I write books containing a lot of EPS images. When I have tried  
> to use
> OpenOffice I have not been satisfied with the rendition of the inserted  
> EPS
> images. Is LibreOffice better, or going to be better, than OpenOffice in
> this respect?

Here's the deal:
OpenOffice as well as LibreOffice can embed EPS images as they are, with  
no changes. The problem is that they cannot display them correctly, all  
you see is the preview image (usually with very low resolution).

If you print or convert to PDF, only the preview image will be visible,  
too, except...

... if you print to a Postscript printer! Since EPS (Encapsulated  
Postscript) is already in the correct format, it will just be sent  
directly to the printer, and LibreOffice does not have to understand the  
contents.
If you have no Postscript printer, here's the trick:

- Install a Postscript printer driver, regardless of whether you have one  
or not (in some versions, OO or LO already have a "generic PS Printer"  
option
- Print the document, but check the "redirect to file" option.
- You now have a sometheing.PS file on your hard disk
- use "ps2pdf"(under Linux and maybe MacOS) or Ghostview (everywhere, but  
takes more time) to convert the postscript file to PDF. Since PDF is  
closely related to Postscript, this can always be done losslessly.
- There you go: a PDF file that everyone in the world can view, and it  
prints just fine.

I know this is kind of roundabout, but right now both OO nor LO can embed  
EPS but can't handle it other than described above.
Regarding SVG: LO can "import" it only, and this currently means "convert  
to a draw vector object and then embed".
This means that simple line drawings or filled shapes and text should be  
just fine, but if you are using the cooler features of SVG (like blurring  
or some of the more complex colour gradients), they will not survive the  
process.
However, if the original image was in EPS format, you have probably a good  
chance to get a working SVG out of it.

If all of the above fails: Try converting the EPS to PDF and import that  
to LO, that does not work 100% either, but it's another chance.

In the meantime: Keep telling everyone here that vector graphics formats,  
like bitmap formats (png, tiff, jpeg, bmp, gif, pcx and a dozen others)  
should be embeddable and printable into and from any office document. I  
don't need to convert a png from Gimp to any other format in order to  
display and print it, and eps and svg should work the same way.

That said: OOo had inline SVGs scheduled for 3.4. So that would reduce  
your problem to converting from EPS to SVG, and that should certainly work  
in Inkscape. I sure hope that LibreOffie will also finally include this  
feature ... it's been on the OOo whishlist since at least 2005.

Cheers,
  Zak

P.S.: At least WMF and EMF don't work reliably in Microsoft office, and  
SVG isn't recognized at all. But EPS always, and so it does in TeX (for  
which EPS is the only recognized vector graphics format).


--
Unsubscribe instructions: E-mail to users+help@libreoffice.org
List archive: http://listarchives.libreoffice.org/www/users/
*** All posts to this list are publicly archived for eternity ***