07 May 2015
Recently I discovered that some academic publishers will let you submit PDF figures right up until acceptance, where they then need to be in an 'editable' format. Vector figures inside PDF containers are editable of course, but the author guidelines for your journal of choice may well say otherwise, instead offering a list of ancient and bewildering image formats which are deemed acceptable. It's baffling to me why a journal would prefer a
pptx
PowerPoint file containing your figure than a modern open standard like SVG
(not a format without consistency issues, admittedly). So for this reason I needed to convert a bunch of PDF figures to EPS (encapsulated postscript) without too much manual effort.- PDF to EPS Converter for Mac. PDF to EPS Converter for Mac implements a sub function of VeryPDF PDF to Any Converter for Mac.You may use PDF to EPS Converter for Mac to convert PDF to EPS. EPS page description language format is an industrial printing standard that can keep the content and page display effect as the same on all standard devices.
- How to Convert PDF to EPS? Click the “Choose Files” button to select your PDF files. Click the “Convert to EPS” button to start the conversion. When the status change to “Done” click the “Download EPS” button; Best Quality. We use both open source and custom software.
- May 27, 2011 That's all. To edit an eps file, you'll need a vector editing application. I'd suggest you try some software packages like Inkscape or Xara. They may be able to do the PDF to EPS conversion as well. And for basic EPS files, Illustrator 8 or newer would work provided your system can run the older versions. Moderm Macs will not run any version.
Conversions
Adobe Acrobat can create such files, if you import a PDF or photo to Acrobat: If you have the Darwinports for free unix commands installed, you can also use the the Terminal 'convert' tool to convert PDF files to EPS files. Convert any JPG files to EPS for free with usage of OnlineConvertFree. ⭐ ️ Convert your JPG image to EPS online in a few seconds.
Google lead me to tex.se where a great answer (+1) lists a few different possible methods of going about this conversion. After trying a couple, it turned out the results were often imperfect and sometimes wildly different.
As an example PDF vector image, here's the measles heatmap I put together recently:
ImageMagick
How well does this convert with, say, ImageMagick:
Wow, I have no idea why that gives such a bad result, maybe it could be improved by tweaking some parameters but I didn't experiment with these.
![Mac Mac](/uploads/1/2/6/6/126674004/868292739.jpg)
Inkscape
Better results came from Inkscape (though linking the commandline version is a pain on OS X):
This looks a bit better, though the bounding box is tightly cropped.
pdftops (xpdf)
The best out-of-the-box result with this file came from
pdftops
(part of xpdf) which maintained PDF margins and converted vector elements reasonably faithfully:Script
To quickly try each of the above methods (and more) I've put a rough bash script together
pdf2eps
that can be cloned from github and run as:Maybe I'll properly develop this script in future, using getopts and testing/installing linked programs, but for now it works as a quick hack!