Is there a future for EPS vector graphics in LO ?

[Christian Lohmaier]

Hi Thorsten, *,

On Wed, May 23, 2012 at 10:07 AM, Thorsten Behrens
<thb at documentfoundation.org> wrote:
> Michael Meeks wrote:
>> [EPS]
> To turn that back into a development discussion - using ghostscript
> out-of-process, like we do it for xpdf/poppler, to convert (e)ps
> into something digestible by LibreOffice is one of the long-pending
> solutions to that problem.

That is what LO already does - as last choice when the two preferred
alternatives are not present.

> That needs a fair bit of hacking, but would love to provide you or
> anyone else interested with code pointers.

Given that the preview is used for printing, one halfway solution is
to not only create a replacement when the eps doesn't have one
already, but always.
When there is no preview in the eps, LO tries to run pstoedit (output
as emf), convert (output as png) or ghostscript (output as 8bit color
png, at least older versions often had problems with orientation).

When convert is found, a replacement is already generated with 300dpi
to allow for some scaling and usable print resolution. Of course this
won't help when it comes to file-size of let's say an exported PDF
that surely would benefit if the EPS could be embedded directly as
vector format instead of a rendered bitmap.

http://opengrok.libreoffice.org/xref/core/filter/source/graphicfilter/ieps/ieps.cxx

ciao
Christian